Direct Bookings vs OTA: What a Direct Booking Really Costs Operators
In the direct bookings vs OTA debate, a direct booking is cheaper only when the customer would have found you anyway. Card and booking-system fees on a direct sale cost around 2 to 7%, against 20 to 30% OTA commission. But if you have to buy that customer through paid search, a direct booking can cost more than the commission you were trying to avoid.
If you run a tour or attraction, you’ve probably seen the numbers. OTAs took 37% of experience bookings in 2025, and operator websites fell from 29% to 25%, according to Arival’s latest Global Operator Landscape research. The usual response is a target on the whiteboard: get direct back up, whatever it takes.
That instinct is right about the leak and wrong about the fix. Commission is a cost, and like any cost it has to be compared with the alternative, which is never zero. This guide puts a real price on three kinds of booking, gives you a break-even test you can run on your own Google Ads account, and sets out how to grow direct bookings without breaking the parity terms in your OTA contracts. For the wider question of what each channel is for, start with our OTA distribution strategy guide.
Key Takeaways
- Direct bookings vs OTA is really three decisions: customers who’d find you anyway, customers an OTA finds for you, and customers you pay to find
- A direct booking from someone who searched your name costs around 2 to 7% in card and booking-system fees; one bought through non-brand paid search can cost close to 40% or more
- The most you should pay to win a direct booking is the order value times your commission rate, minus your direct transaction costs: about £14.50 on a £62.50 order at 25%
- The biggest commission leaks are your own brand name, repeat and local visitors, and a direct price that ends up higher than the OTA’s
- Direct-only perks on your own website can breach GetYourGuide’s parity terms, so grow direct through Google, on-site capture and products OTAs don’t sell
Direct Bookings vs OTA: The Short Answer
Most comparisons of direct vs OTA bookings for tours and attractions put 0% next to 25% and stop there. That comparison only holds for one type of customer.
Every booking you take falls into one of three groups. Some customers were always going to find you: they searched your name, they came last year, or they live down the road. Some were found by an OTA: a family from Ohio browsing “things to do in Edinburgh” on GetYourGuide three weeks before their trip. And some you have to go and buy, usually through Google Ads on searches that don’t include your name.
Each group has a different cost per booking, and the right channel is different for each. The first group should almost never come through an OTA. The second is what commission is for. The third is where operators chasing a direct percentage most often lose money without noticing.
The billboard effect (travellers finding you on an OTA, then booking direct) blurs these lines a little. Our distribution strategy guide covers what the evidence does and doesn’t show. One thing to keep in mind: the independent research on it, such as Cornell’s billboard effect studies, comes entirely from hotels.
What a Direct Booking Really Costs
The cost of a direct booking comes in three parts. Two are easy to see on your statements. The third is the one that decides the argument.
Payment processing
Card fees are the floor. A standard UK card through Stripe costs 1.5% plus 20p, and cards from outside the UK cost noticeably more once cross-border and currency fees apply (as of October 2026; check your own provider’s rates). International visitors are exactly the people OTAs are good at reaching, so if you’re comparing like for like, use the higher figure.
Add chargebacks, which typically cost around £20 each in dispute fees. On OTA bookings the platform takes the payment and runs the dispute, although some contracts pass part of the cost back to you (our guide to the merchant vs agency model explains who carries what).
Your booking system’s fee
Most tour and attraction booking systems charge per booking as well as, or instead of, a monthly subscription. The model matters as much as the rate.
Some systems, FareHarbor among them, typically charge up to 6% per online booking and usually show it to the customer as a separate booking fee at checkout. Rezdy lets you choose whether to absorb its fee or pass it on. Our comparison of Bokun vs FareHarbor vs Rezdy goes through each pricing model in detail (vendor pricing changes often, so confirm your own plan).
A fee passed to the customer doesn’t cost you anything on paper. It can still cost you the booking, and we’ll come back to why.
The cost of finding the customer
This is the part almost every direct bookings vs OTA comparison leaves out. If someone types your attraction’s name into Google and books on your site, your acquisition cost is close to zero. If you paid Google to put you in front of someone searching “rainy day activities Cornwall”, you paid for every click that didn’t book as well as the one that did.
Here’s how the three groups compare. The example is hypothetical: an attraction with a £25 adult ticket and an average order of 2.5 tickets, or £62.50.
| Booking type | How the customer found you | Your cost per order | Share of £62.50 |
|---|---|---|---|
| OTA booking | Search on GetYourGuide or Viator | 25% commission: £15.63 | 25% |
| Direct, demand you already had | Searched your name, repeat or local visitor | Card fees (£1.14 to £2.23) plus 0 to 3% booking-system fee | About 2 to 7% |
| Direct, demand you bought | Non-brand Google Ads | Card and system fees plus ad spend: at £0.90 a click and a 4% conversion rate, £22.50 in ads alone | Around 38 to 43% |
The click price and conversion rate in the last row are illustrative, not benchmarks. Published travel advertising benchmarks vary wildly between sources, and costs per click swing heavily between peak and off-peak. Use your own account’s numbers.
Is OTA Commission Worth It? The Break-Even Test
OTA commission is worth paying whenever it costs less than finding that customer yourself. You can turn that into one number for your business.
Maximum cost per direct booking = (order value × OTA commission rate) − direct transaction costs
Example: (£62.50 × 25%) − £1.14 = £14.49
If most of your visitors pay with overseas cards, use your higher card cost. At £2.23, the figure drops to about £13.40.
If your non-brand paid search wins bookings for less than £14.49 each, buying them is cheaper than paying commission, and you should spend more. If it costs more, the OTA is the cheaper way to reach that customer, and its commission is the better deal for that segment.
To run the test, pull the last 90 days from your Google Ads account and split campaigns into brand (searches containing your name) and non-brand. Divide spend by booking conversions for each. Do it by season if you can, because a click that’s affordable in February can be twice the price in August.
You’ll often see the same pattern. Brand campaigns cost a fraction of the break-even. Non-brand campaigns for competitive “things to do” searches sit well above it, especially in peak season.
That doesn’t mean switching non-brand advertising off. It means knowing what you’re paying for, and treating OTAs as an acquisition channel with a known price rather than a tax. Our guide to calculating your true OTA margin shows how to fold delivery costs into the same comparison.
A while ago I worked with a heritage attraction that decided to “take back control” of its summer. It pulled its two largest OTA listings in June and moved the money it expected to save into Google Ads. By the end of August its direct share had risen by about a third, which pleased the board.
Its total visitor numbers were down, and when we added up the ad spend, each extra direct booking had cost more than the commission it replaced. The listings went back on in September.
Where Operators Overpay Commission
If OTA commission is a fair price for customers an OTA finds, the real problem is commission paid on customers it didn’t find. That happens in four places, and each one can be checked.
Your own brand name. Search your attraction’s name on your phone. If an OTA ad or listing sits above your website, some of the people who already chose you are paying 25% to reach you. Run that search in a few locations and at different times. If OTAs are bidding on your name, a brand campaign of your own usually costs far less per click than any non-brand search.
Repeat and local visitors. A family with an annual pass shouldn’t be booking through Viator. If your OTA booking reports show local postcodes or repeat names, that’s demand you’ve lost to a worse channel, usually because your own booking process was harder to find or use.
A direct price that’s higher than the OTA’s. This is the booking fee problem.
Take a hypothetical kayak tour in the Lake District priced at £45 everywhere. On GetYourGuide the customer pays £45. On the operator’s own site, a 6% booking fee appears at checkout and the total becomes £47.70.
The customer who checked both books the cheaper one, and the operator pays £11.25 in commission on a booking that would have cost it only card fees direct. Google’s Things to Do ticket links show OTA prices next to the official site, so customers make this comparison in the search results too.
Promotions you funded. If you fund an OTA promotion, or a platform matches a discount you run elsewhere (Tiqets’ terms allow this), you’re paying commission on a cheaper ticket, often to someone who would have paid full price.
Once you’ve found which leak is biggest, you know where to start. If the problem is the rate itself rather than where bookings come from, our guide to negotiating OTA commission covers what gives you bargaining power.
How to Drive Direct Bookings Without Breaking Parity
Most advice on driving direct bookings comes from hotels: offer direct bookers a free upgrade, a better cancellation policy or an exclusive time slot. For tours and attractions, that advice can get you into trouble.
GetYourGuide’s supplier terms require the prices, availability, amenities and restrictions on GetYourGuide to be at least as good as those on your own online shops. A free extra, a better cancellation policy or a slot only bookable on your site can all count.
Viator’s August 2026 agreement goes further and lets Viator and its partners set the final retail price. Check your own agreement before trying any direct-only offer. Our guide to OTA rate parity explains what each platform’s clause covers and which direct-only offers are risky, and our guide to OTA contract terms covers the rest of the agreement.
That still leaves plenty of room. These four approaches work within the rules.
Own your name on Google
Make sure your website ranks first for your attraction’s name, and run a small brand campaign if OTAs are bidding on it. Complete your Google Business Profile, because map listings are one place an OTA can’t appear as a local business. Then set up Google Things to Do through your booking system, if it’s an approved connectivity partner. It gives you free booking links and an “Official site” label next to the OTA prices.
Make your own checkout at least as good as the OTA’s
Your site competes with GetYourGuide’s checkout, not with a competitor’s website. Check it on a phone, on mobile data, as a first-time visitor.
Count the taps from your homepage to payment. Check whether a booking fee appears at the last step. If booking with you is slower or dearer than booking through an OTA, no amount of marketing will fix your direct share.
Capture people on the day, however they booked
Customer details from an OTA booking reach you to deliver the visit, not to market to, and using them for marketing can breach your agreement. A visitor standing at your entrance is different. Wi-Fi sign-up, an email opt-in at the till, a membership desk, photo sales and gift shop receipts all build a first-party list. The OTA customer you capture this way can book direct next time without anyone breaking a rule.
Take a hypothetical aquarium in Cornwall that asks every visitor to scan a QR code for a free digital guide, with an optional newsletter sign-up. Around one in five visitors opts in, OTA customers included. By the next spring, the list is its cheapest booking channel by a distance.
Build the demand OTAs shouldn’t carry
Annual passes, memberships, local resident offers, school visits and group bookings (often better served through travel trade than OTAs) are products and audiences OTAs either don’t sell or sell badly. Each one you grow is demand that never goes near commission. Check how your contracts define the product before pricing a residents’ offer, and keep it behind proof of address or sold offline.
How to Reduce Reliance on OTAs, in the Right Order
The order matters more than the tactics. Cut OTA allocation first, and you lose the bookings before anything has replaced them.
Work through it in order:
- Measure. Find your cost per booking for every channel, including ad spend, and split OTA bookings by how the customer found you where you can.
- Fix the leaks. Brand search, checkout price, repeat visitors. These are the cheapest wins.
- Grow direct. Build first-party lists and products OTAs don’t carry.
- Then rebalance. Once direct volume is growing, tighten OTA allocation on peak dates first, and set a concentration limit on how much revenue any one platform can carry.
One option that looks like a shortcut deserves a warning.
Some OTAs now offer their own white-label booking widgets for your website. GetYourGuide’s ticketing solution is one, and Arival reported that early adopters described its fees as competitive, though GetYourGuide didn’t disclose them. The trade-off is that the OTA then sees all of your online sales, and your “direct” channel runs on a competitor’s system. Weigh that before signing.
To track whether any of this is working, use net revenue per ticket by channel, as set out in our guide to measuring OTA performance, rather than direct share on its own.
So Which Channel Should You Grow?
The direct bookings vs OTA question isn’t about picking a side. Protect the customers who were already yours, because paying commission on them is the most expensive mistake on this list. Let OTAs earn their commission on the customers they genuinely find. And only buy direct customers through advertising when your cost per booking beats your break-even number.
Your next step is a small one. Search your attraction’s name on your phone today and see who appears above you. Then pull 90 days of Google Ads data and work out your brand and non-brand cost per booking against the break-even formula. That afternoon’s work will tell you more about your direct booking strategy than any channel-share target.
Direct Booking vs OTA: Questions Operators Ask
Are direct bookings always cheaper than OTA bookings?
No. A direct booking from someone who searched your name costs only card and booking-system fees, usually 2 to 7%. A direct booking you paid to acquire through non-brand advertising can cost more than 25% commission once you count all the clicks that didn’t convert.
Can I sell tickets cheaper on my own website than on GetYourGuide or Viator?
Usually not without risk. GetYourGuide’s terms require its prices, availability, amenities and restrictions to be at least as good as those on your own online shops. Viator’s August 2026 agreement lets Viator set the final retail price. Check your own contracts before running any direct-only price or perk. Our rate parity guide works through the common cases, from promo codes to locals’ discounts.
Does being on OTAs increase direct bookings?
Possibly. This is known as the billboard effect: travellers discover you on an OTA, then book with you directly. The independent evidence comes from hotels, and the data for tours and attractions comes from the OTAs themselves, so treat the size of the effect with caution.
How do I reduce reliance on OTAs?
Grow other channels before cutting OTA allocation. Own your brand search, fix any checkout fees that make your price higher than the OTA’s, capture visitors’ details on site, and build products like annual passes that OTAs don’t sell. Then rebalance peak-date allocation once direct volume has grown.
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