If your room goes for $100 a night and Booking.com takes 20%, you're handing over $20. For a 10-room property running at 70% occupancy, that's roughly $51,000 a year in commission that you're losing.

OTA commission sits somewhere between 15% and 25% depending on your market, your property type, and how much you've opted into their "visibility programmes". The number compounds quickly, and most hotel owners know it hurts but feel like there's no real alternative.

If you're running a guesthouse in Bali, a boutique hotel in Nairobi, or a surf camp in Nicaragua, Booking.com and Expedia puts you in front of travellers who would never have found you otherwise. They handle the trust gap - a guest in Germany doesn't know you, but they know Booking.com, and that matters. The reviews you collect there build a reputation that takes years to earn on your own.

For newer properties especially, OTAs are often the only realistic way to fill rooms in the first year or two.

For new guests who arrive via OTA, the goal is to make the on-property experience good enough to make booking direct the obvious, easy option.

That means having a direct booking option that actually works: A payment link you can send over WhatsApp, or a proper booking flow on your website that doesn't redirect them somewhere else or ask them to email you and wait.

You need a way for guests to select dates, see availability, and pay without leaving your site.

A simple embeddable booking widget handles this. Tab's Checkout Flow, for example, drops into any website with no developer required, lets guests choose rooms or activities, shows live availability, and processes payment directly. No booking commission - just a transaction fee of 2.9% plus $1, which is a fraction of what any OTA charges. It also handles currency conversion for international guests, which is one of the quiet friction points that kills direct bookings on properties in emerging markets.

To avoid double booking across platforms, iCal syncing lets your availability calendar update across platforms automatically. When a room books on one channel, it blocks on the others.

You can also charge credit cards and virtual cards received from OTAs directly through Tab, again for a fraction of the commission that OTAs charge.