What to budget for digital marketing as a hotel or resort
How to size a marketing budget for a hotel or resort around the commission saved through direct bookings, not just a generic revenue percentage.
4 min read
Hospitality marketing has a specific commercial goal that a generic agency may not fully grasp: growing direct bookings relative to OTA-sourced bookings, since this ratio directly affects margin far more than overall booking volume alone.
Questions worth asking directly
- How would you measure and grow our direct booking share specifically?
- How would you handle rate parity considerations between our direct channel and OTA listings?
- Can you show a booking engine or direct-booking campaign you've built for a hospitality client?
- How would you plan promotional spend around our specific seasonal occupancy pattern?
Signs of a good fit
An agency that asks about your current direct booking share, OTA commission rates and seasonal occupancy pattern before proposing tactics is treating the category's real economics seriously.
The right hospitality agency asks about your OTA commission rate before they ask about your Instagram aesthetic.
What good reporting looks like
Monthly reporting on direct booking share, average booking value and repeat guest rate, not just website traffic and social media engagement in isolation.
The takeaway
Ask an agency how they would measure and grow direct booking share specifically — an agency that only talks about general brand awareness misses the core commercial goal in this category.
Written by Fibvo — Bengaluru and Erode, India — working with clients in other time zones. Questions, or think we have it wrong? Tell us.
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