Winning Back Direct Bookings

Foreword, from the founders

Hey, I'm Chanel, a co-founder of Sorino. Over the last few years our team has sat with a lot of hotel operators, and the same quiet frustration keeps coming up. You do the hard part. You fill the room. And then a chunk of the money walks straight back out of the door to whoever the guest happened to book through.

It is not that the booking sites do nothing. They send you guests. But once someone already knows your name, once they have your hotel in mind and they are calling or messaging to book, paying a commission on that booking is paying twice for a guest you had already won. A lot of those guests would happily book with you directly. They ring, and no one is free to pick up. They message, and it sits unread. So they go back to the app that answers.

This report is about closing that gap: answering your own guests, on your own channels, so the booking, and the margin, stays with you. Not a trick, not a chatbot bolted on the front. Just your phone, your inbox and your messages, actually answered.

What this report covers

Every hotel lives with the same tension: you need the reach of the big booking platforms, but every booking they bring costs you a slice of an already thin margin. This report looks at one practical move: winning more of your bookings back onto your own channels, where they cost you nothing per booking.

Section one

The squeeze: why every point of margin matters now

You do not need convincing that margins are tight, but it is worth saying plainly. On UKHospitality's own reading of the sector, around one in three hospitality businesses were operating at a loss, and roughly seven in ten were running at or below 85% of capacity. This is an industry that employs about 3.5 million people and puts around £93 billion into the economy, working on margins where a few points either way decides whether a site makes money.

When the margin is that thin, the cut a third party takes on each booking is not a rounding error. It is often the difference.

Section two

Where your bookings actually come from

Here is the part most operators feel but rarely see written down. For UK hotels, the biggest revenue-generating booking channels are the online travel agents, Booking.com first and Expedia close behind, with your own website sitting third. In other words, the two channels bringing in the most money are the two that charge you for the privilege, and your own direct channel, the one that costs you nothing per booking, is behind them.

The good news underneath that: direct booking is growing, not shrinking. Guests increasingly want to deal with the hotel itself.

The demand to book with you directly is already there. The question is whether you can answer it when it arrives.

Section three

What the booking sites take

The headline cost is commission. On hotel bookings, the online travel agents typically take somewhere between 10% and 25% of the room rate on every booking they pass you. Booking.com's standard rate sits around 15%, and climbs towards the low twenties once you pay for the visibility programmes that push you up the search results.

Two things make it sting more than the headline number suggests:

• It is charged on guests who already chose you. A guest searching your town might genuinely be discovered on the platform. But plenty of bookings are people who already know your hotel, defaulting to the app because it is the easy way to book. You pay commission on those exactly the same.
• Rate parity ties your hands. Most booking-site contracts include a rate-parity clause: you cannot advertise a lower price on your own website than the one on the platform. So the obvious answer, just be cheaper direct, is often off the table by contract.

That leaves one lever fully in your control: capture more bookings before they reach the platform, by answering the guest when they come to you first.

Section four

Answer the direct booking before it defaults to the app

The direct booking that gets lost usually goes like this. A guest calls the hotel to book. It is the middle of a changeover, the desk is dealing with an arrival, and the phone rings out. The guest does not wait. They open the app they trust to answer, and book there instead. You get the booking, but now it carries a commission you would not have paid if someone had picked up.

The fix is not a slicker website. It is making sure the direct channels are actually answered, every time:

• The phone is answered on the first ring, day or night, and the booking is taken then and there.
• The enquiry email that lands at 11pm gets a proper, accurate reply before morning.
• The website chat and the social message get the same answer, from the same source of truth, so a guest never has to chase.

Every booking you take directly is a booking that keeps its full margin. On a room that would otherwise arrive with a 15% to 23% commission attached, that saved commission is close to pure profit.

Section five

What the AI actually does: four channels, one knowledge base

Sorino puts an AI agent on the channels that go unanswered, all reading from one knowledge base of your own information: your rooms, your rates, your hours, your policies and your local knowledge. It works alongside your team, covering the hours and the moments they cannot pick up.

The point of all of it is simple: catch the direct booking at the moment it arrives, so it never has to default to a channel that charges you.

Section six

What we will not let AI do

Winning back margin is not worth getting the basics wrong. So a few lines we hold:

• It answers from your knowledge base, not from guesswork. If it does not know, it says so and hands off.
• Anything sensitive, a complaint or a complex request, goes to a person.
• It works alongside your team, never instead of them. It covers the hours they cannot, and hands the guest over cleanly when a human should take it.
• It is on the record. You can see what it said and what it booked.

Getting started

You do not have to take our word for any of this. The honest way to judge it is to hear it answer.

Build your hotel's agent, ask it the awkward questions a real guest would, and hear how it sounds before you commit to anything. If it can take the booking your phone would have missed, that is a booking that keeps its full margin, starting with the very next call.

Sources

We do not publish a figure unless it is real and attributable. The numbers in this report are:

• Online travel agent commission on hotel bookings, 10% to 25% of the room rate: Preno, 2026. prenohq.com
• Booking.com standard commission around 15%, rising with visibility programmes, plus the rate-parity clause: Rield, 2026. rield-rm.com
• UK hotel booking channel mix (online travel agents the top revenue channels, direct third) and 66% of millennials preferring direct booking: SiteMinder, 2026. siteminder.com
• Sector margin context (around one in three businesses at a loss; 69% at or below 85% capacity; 3.5 million employed; £93 billion): UKHospitality, 2025. ukhospitality.org.uk