How much should a hotel spend on marketing? Start with the commission you already pay

Most independent hotels already spend between 15 and 25 per cent of their OTA room revenue on marketing. It just arrives as a commission invoice rather than a decision. So the useful question is not "how much should we spend" but "how much of what we already spend can be moved from commission into things we keep". This guide gives the logic and a worked example. Prices for our own work are on the pricing page, not here.

Start from the number you already pay

Take rooms, occupancy over the year, average daily rate, the share of room nights that arrive through OTAs, and the commission rate on your extranet invoices. Multiply them. A worked example, with round numbers we made up for the sum: twelve rooms at 65 per cent occupancy sell 2,847 room nights a year. If 60 per cent of them come through OTAs, that is 1,708 nights at an ADR of £115, or £196,420 of room revenue on which a 15 per cent commission is £29,463. That property's marketing budget is £29,000 a year, and it has been all along. The question is what else that money could buy.

Why the trade-press benchmark misleads

The figures quoted for hotel marketing budgets, a few per cent of total revenue, are written for chains with a brand, a loyalty scheme and a central reservations team, and they usually exclude commission because a chain books the commission as distribution cost. For an independent, commission is the marketing budget. Comparing your spend to a chain's percentage will tell you that you spend nothing, when you spend more than they do per room.

Where the money goes, in order of return

1. The Google Business Profile and hotel listing, with your own rate in the price list. Cheapest, fastest, and it turns name searches from commission to nothing.
2. The booking path on your site: live rates on the room pages, the total shown first, an engine that looks like your site and works on a phone.
3. Reviews, asked for every stay, replied to every time. Free apart from the discipline.
4. Pages for the specific searches: rooms, offers, seasons, dog friendly, parking, the venue up the road. This is the part that compounds and the part most properties never build.
5. Email to past guests, one message a season. The cheapest occupancy there is.
6. Google Hotel Ads on your own name and live dates, where an OTA is bidding on you. Pay per click, capped, measured.
7. Everything else: print, social, the tourism board's paid listing, influencers. Some of it works; none of it works before the six above are done.

The break-even sum for any monthly spend

A pound spent on direct-booking work pays for itself when it moves enough nights from OTA to direct. Each moved night saves the commission minus the direct booking cost: at £115 ADR with 15 per cent commission and 3 per cent engine and card fees, that is £13.80 a night. So a monthly spend of £500 needs about 36 nights a month moved, or 3 a night in a twelve-room property, to break even before it has sold a single extra room. That is the honest way to judge a retainer, a booking engine or a website: how many nights a month it has to move, and whether that is plausible for your property. Then hold the supplier to the number.

What changes the answer for your property

• ADR. At £60 a night every moved night is worth a third of what it is at £180, so a budget B&B has to move three times as many nights to justify the same spend.
• OTA share. A property at 80 per cent OTA has more to move and gains faster; one already at 30 per cent is buying extra occupancy, not saving commission, and should judge spend by new nights.
• Seasonality. A property closed four months a year has eight months to earn the year's spend back, so the work has to be done before the season, not during it.
• Competition in the town. A single inn in a village wins the specific searches quickly; a boutique hotel in Bath is in a long game and should budget for twelve months before judging.

What to refuse to spend on

• "SEO" that builds pages for towns you are not in. Google's doorway policy filters them and the filter takes the good pages down too.
• Reviews, in any form: bought, incentivised without disclosure, or written by staff. Banned under the 2025 consumer rules and the platforms' policies, and the penalty is the listing itself.
• An OTA visibility booster before your own rate is in Google's price list. It buys more of the bookings you then pay commission on.
• A website with no booking engine and no rates on the pages, however beautiful. It is a brochure, and brochures send guests to Booking.com.
• Anyone who promises a position. Nobody controls that; the work can be listed and the numbers shown.

When to spend it

Ahead of the booking window, not ahead of the season. Christmas breaks are booked from September, so the Christmas page and the offer need to be live by July to be indexed and settled. Summer is researched from January. If the spend is a monthly retainer, the months that matter most are the quiet ones before each window, which is the opposite of when an owner feels like spending.

Put your own numbers into the commission calculator on the pricing page. It shows what the OTAs take in a year and what each ten points moved to direct is worth after your booking costs, which is the figure any marketing spend has to beat.