Every booking made through an OTA instead of your own site costs you a commission. Paste your URL and find out whether your site is actually competing for that booking.
Most guests who book through an OTA aren't doing so because it's genuinely cheaper — pricing is often identical or close to it under rate parity agreements most hotels have signed. They're booking through habit: a saved payment method, a familiar interface, and an assumption that it's simply the normal way to book a hotel.
That means winning a direct booking is less about competing on price and more about interrupting a habit at the exact moment someone's about to default to it. A guest who's already decided on your hotel — perhaps after finding you on an OTA search first — is genuinely willing to book direct if given a clear, low-friction reason to. The problem is most hotel sites never actually make that case; they simply present a booking engine and hope.
This is why the specific benefit of booking direct has to be stated, not implied. 'Best rate guaranteed,' a small direct-only perk, or simply a genuinely faster checkout than the OTA's own flow — any of these can be enough to interrupt the habit, but only if the guest actually sees them before defaulting to what's familiar.
The three issues below are the ones most commonly standing between a guest's willingness to book direct and them actually doing it.
OTAs have the traffic advantage. Your own site's advantage has to be everything else — price parity confidence, room clarity, and a booking flow that's actually easier than leaving your site.
No — it doesn't compare live pricing across platforms. It evaluates whether your own site presents a clear, compelling reason to book direct, and whether your booking engine itself creates unnecessary friction.
It evaluates whether the booking flow is present, visible, and appears usable based on the page structure — not the live transactional functionality of the booking engine itself, which requires a real booking attempt to fully verify.
Yes, in that it evaluates clarity and trust signals appropriate to your actual positioning, rather than assuming a specific scale or hotel category.
It's specifically calibrated around the direct-booking-versus-OTA dynamic, since that's the central commercial tension for most independent hotels, rather than treating booking behaviour as a generic e-commerce checkout problem.
The SiteMedic team can implement every recommendation for you. Send us your results and we'll quote the fix.
Get it fixed →