What this guide is, and what it is not
There is no hotel, pub or venue client on this site. Nothing below is a case study in hospitality, and the guide is written as a method rather than as proof.
It is worth saying what that costs you as a reader. A studio with ten hotel clients could tell you what a direct-booking share looks like before and after a rebuild, and this page cannot. What it can do is set out the structural work, say where the published rules sit, and show the market data we actually measured rather than an industry average borrowed from somebody else.
Food and allergens are deliberately not covered here. A hotel with a restaurant has a genuine obligation about allergen information, and it is set out properly in a separate guide on this site rather than summarised loosely in this one.
The commission is the whole argument
Everything else in this guide follows from one piece of arithmetic that every operator already knows and most websites ignore.
A room sold through an intermediary pays commission. A room sold through your own site pays a card fee. The gap between those two numbers is the budget for the website, the photography, the search work and the person answering the phone — and it recurs every single booking, for ever.
That means the honest way to judge a hospitality website is not whether it looks like the booking sites. It is whether it moves a share of bookings from the channel that charges commission to the one that does not. A beautiful site that funnels its traffic into a third-party widget without ever making the direct case has not done the job.
And the shift does not have to be large to pay for itself. The point of saying so plainly is that it sets the brief: every decision below is judged against whether a guest who arrived ready to compare ends up booking here instead.
Compete where the booking sites are weak
A booking site is excellent at comparison and poor at specificity. It shows twelve hotels in a grid with a star rating and a price, because that is what it is for. It cannot tell a guest that the rooms above the bar are lively on a Saturday, that the car park takes eight cars and the rest is on-street, or that the lift does not reach the second floor.
Those are exactly the things a guest is anxious about, and a site that answers them wins bookings from a site that does not — including from the version of your own hotel listed on a platform.
In practice:
- A page per room type, with the real room photographed rather than a staged composite, the actual bed size, the actual view, and what is different about it. A guest choosing between your two doubles is a guest who has already decided to stay with you.
- A page per function or event use — weddings, wakes, meetings, christenings, dinners — each with capacity, layout options, what is included and a price band. Venue enquiries are the highest-value traffic a pub or small hotel gets and they are almost always squeezed into one "Functions" page.
- The anxious practicalities as findable content: parking, check-in and check-out, luggage storage, accessibility, dogs, children, late arrivals, breakfast times. Every one of those is a search somebody makes with your name attached to it.
- The area, written by somebody who lives there. Not a generic "explore the city" block, but what is a ten-minute walk away and what is not. This is the one piece of content a platform structurally cannot produce.
A chatbot is not a substitute for any of that. An answer a guest has to ask for is an answer search engines never see and half your guests never find.
The price you show has to be the price they pay
This is the one place in this guide where a published rule applies directly, so it is worth getting exactly right rather than approximately.
In February 2019 the CMA took enforcement action against six accommodation booking sites over pressure selling, misleading discount claims, the effect of commission on ranking, and hidden charges. The six gave formal undertakings, with changes in place by 1 September 2019. Alongside that the CMA published principles for the sector and said explicitly that it was calling on all online accommodation booking sites — "including search engines, big hotel groups and short-stay apartment rentals" — to comply with consumer protection law.
That wording is why this matters on your own site and not only on a platform. The commitments the CMA secured included showing all compulsory charges — taxes, booking fees, resort fees — in the headline price, with any breakdown shown as well as the total rather than instead of it; being clear about discount claims and only promoting deals actually available; and not giving a false impression of availability or popularity to rush a decision.
The practical reading for a direct booking page: a resort fee, a compulsory cleaning charge or a card surcharge revealed at step four is the problem the CMA acted on. "Only 1 room left!" that is not true, and a struck-through price that compares a weekday rate to a weekend one, are the same category of problem. If you have copied an urgency widget from a platform because it seemed to work, that is worth a second look.
This is a web studio summarising published CMA material so you can see where on a site it gets implemented. It is not legal advice. If you also sell packages — a room with flights, or a coach trip with accommodation — a different set of rules applies and there is a separate guide here on the ATOL display requirements.
What the search market actually looks like
Our own measured figures for this sector are published in full on the hospitality industry page, and they say something slightly awkward.
Those are terms a studio selling to hotels competes for, not terms your guests search. They are published because they show how the market was measured, not as a forecast for you.
What does carry across is the shape. In hospitality, the broad high-volume phrase is contested and the specific one is not — and that is almost always true of guest-side search too. "Hotel Manchester" is a war. "Dog friendly hotel with parking near Piccadilly" is not, and the guest typing it is much closer to booking. The whole of the previous section is, in search terms, a strategy for owning the second kind of query.
The highest cost per click we measured in this sector was £19.86. If a studio or an agency is bidding that to reach you, it is worth knowing what the equivalent number is in your own market before you spend anything on ads — which means measuring it rather than guessing.
What to check on your own site
- Does the first price a guest sees include every compulsory charge?
- Does every room type have its own page, with photographs of that room?
- Is there a page per function use with real capacities and a price band, or one "Functions" page with a form on it?
- Can a guest find parking, accessibility, check-in times and dog policy without asking anybody?
- Is the reason to book direct specific — something a guest gets here and nowhere else — or a banner claiming a guarantee?
- Does the area content say anything a platform could not have written?
- Are any urgency or scarcity messages on the site actually true?
- If you serve food, is allergen information handled properly? That is a separate obligation and there is a separate guide for it.
The first and the fifth are the two that most often decide whether the booking happens here or somewhere that charges you for it.
