Question
What is a good direct booking rate for a hotel?
For an independent UK property, more than 40 per cent of room nights booked direct is good, more than 50 is strong, and under 25 means the OTAs own your guests. Cloudbeds' 2026 State of Independent Hotels report, built on 90 million bookings, put OTA share at 63.4 per cent in 2025, so the typical independent is around 37 per cent direct and drifting the wrong way.
Direct means any booking that did not pass through an intermediary: the booking engine on your site, the phone, email, a walk-in, a returning guest who wrote to you. Count room nights rather than reservations, because OTA bookings skew short, and take twelve months so the seasons balance. The property management system's source report gives the number in a few minutes.
What moves it
- The name search. If your own rate is in the price list on Google's knowledge panel, guests who already know you book direct. If not, they book through an OTA. This one fix moves most properties five to ten points on its own.
- The booking path. Live rates on the room pages, the total shown first, an engine that looks like your site and works on a phone. Guests who cannot see a price go to the OTA to find one.
- A reason to book direct: breakfast, parking, late checkout or a better cancellation window on the direct rate, all allowed under the narrow parity in the OTA terms.
- Past guests. An email list with one message a season is repeat business at almost no cost, and repeat business is always direct.
- Pages for the specific searches, which the OTAs do not have, so the guest arrives on your site first.
What a realistic year looks like
Ten points of OTA share moved to direct in twelve months is a good year for a property that starts near the average. In a twelve-room property at 65 per cent occupancy that is about 285 nights, and the calculator on our pricing page shows what those nights are worth after your booking costs. Twenty points in a year happens when the listing was badly wrong and the name search was going entirely to the OTAs; that is a correction, not a trend, and the second year is slower.
When a low number is fine
A new property with no reviews and no past guests should expect the OTAs to bring most of its first year, and should use that year to build the list and the listing. A remote property whose guests are mostly from abroad may sit at half and half for good reasons. The number to worry about is not the level; it is the direction. A rate that falls two years running means the OTAs are taking the name searches and nobody has noticed.
The service
Direct bookings: how we move the ratio
The longer read
How much should a hotel spend on marketing
Follow-up questions
- Should phone bookings count as direct?
- Yes. Anything that did not pass through an intermediary is direct: phone, email, walk-in, the booking engine, a returning guest. The point of the number is what you paid commission on, and a phone booking cost you nothing but the call.
- Is 100 per cent direct the goal?
- No. The OTAs bring guests who would never have found you, particularly from abroad, and cost nothing until those guests stay. The goal is that the guests who already knew your name book with you, and that the ratio is one you chose.
- How do I measure direct bookings if I use a channel manager?
- The channel manager or property management system tags every reservation with its source. Run the report by room nights for the last twelve months and add phone and email bookings if they are entered by hand. Write the figure down on the first of every month.
Answered by Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital, 5 September 2026.