Commissions are a cost that grows right along with you
The more bookings you handle through portals, the more you pay in commissions. It's simple math, but it's easy to ignore when the portal is convenient and keeps sending steady traffic. The problem is that the commission doesn't shrink as you scale — it grows proportionally, month after month.
The good news is that cutting commissions doesn't mean dropping the portals. It means building a parallel channel — your own booking website that gradually takes on a larger share of inquiries over time.
It's not a choice between "the portal or your own website"
It's worth clearing up one misunderstanding right away: this is about adding a channel, not shutting down the one that's already working. Booking.com and Airbnb can still bring in new guests, especially ones who don't know your brand yet.
A booking system on your own website works best as a second, complementary channel — particularly for returning guests, referrals, or people who find your brand through Google.
Where you can realistically cut commissions
The biggest potential for direct bookings usually comes from:
- guests who've stayed with you before and want to come back,
- people referred by friends or previous guests,
- Google traffic searching for a specific service or location,
- contacts from social media, who end up on your website anyway.
None of these groups needs to go through a portal to make a booking — as long as you have somewhere safe and convenient for them to do it.
SEO as the foundation of a direct channel
Direct bookings don't happen on their own. You need to be found on Google, ideally for search terms that actually lead to bookings, not just general information.
A landing page focused on a specific service and location performs far better here than a single generic homepage. That's exactly the approach behind our location pages for the Canary Islands — each island has its own context, seasonality, and typical guest, so the content is tailored rather than generic.
Guest database and remarketing
A portal rarely hands over full contact details for a guest. Your own booking system flips that around — the guest's details, with their consent, stay with the owner.
That opens the door to remarketing: reminders before the next season, special offers for returning guests, requests for a review after the stay. None of that is possible if the only trace of the booking is a message sitting in a portal inbox.
Check if it pays off before you start
Before investing time and budget into your own system, it's worth calculating how much commissions are actually costing you today and how quickly your own channel could pay for itself. That's what the Booking and Airbnb commission calculator is for — a simple way to see actual numbers instead of guessing.
If the result shows that commissions play a significant role in your costs, that's a sign it's worth checking the booking system pricing too, to see what scope of implementation makes sense to start with.
A long-term channel, not a one-off project
Your own booking system is best treated as a sales channel, not a one-off "build the site and forget about it" project. Over time, as SEO, your guest database, and reviews grow, the share of direct bookings naturally increases, and dependence on portal commissions shrinks.
Summary
Cutting Booking.com and Airbnb commissions is a process, not a one-off decision. It starts with a well-designed booking website, gets a boost from local SEO and a guest database, and the results show up best over the span of a few seasons.
Want to see what a system like this could look like for your business? Get in touch through the contact form — together we'll assess whether and when your own direct-booking channel would start to pay off.
