Booking.com ranks for 603,057 keywords in the UK, 17,214 of them in first position, for an estimated 14.7 million organic visits a month. On top of that it bids on 2,099 paid keywords. Its name alone is searched 1,000,000 times a month, peaking at 1,220,000 between May and August 2026 (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026).
For a hotel, marketing is not a cost you still have to decide on: it is already in the accounts, as commission. The real question is how much of that commission can be moved to the direct channel, and with what investment.
Below are the sums few hotels do, where demand actually lands and how to split a budget between OTAs, search and your own website.
Commission is your marketing budget
A property turning over £500,000 a year, with half its bookings from OTAs and commission at around 15%, pays roughly £37,500 a year to intermediaries. That is over £3,000 a month going out without appearing in any marketing plan, because it is booked as a cost of sales.
Put that way, the question changes shape. It is not "can I afford to invest in the direct channel", it is "how much of that £3,000 a month can I move to a channel that then stays mine".
The answer is never a hundred per cent. OTAs do something your website cannot: they show you to people who don't know you exist. They are a discovery channel with a high cost and an immediate return, and you keep them. What can be won back is the share of guests who already knew you and still went through the OTA.
Where demand actually lands
"Hotels near me" gets 1,830,000 searches a month in the UK, rising to 2,240,000 from May to October, and costs £1.07 a click with low competition. "B&b near me" gets 14,800, with a summer peak of 18,100 in July and August.
These are searches made during the trip, often on a phone, by people who need a bed tonight or tomorrow. Google answers with the map and the hotel box: here you are not competing with Booking, you are competing with the hotels within a mile or two, and the tools are an up-to-date Business Profile and connected prices.
The second family is destination searches, which happen months earlier and are still winnable: this is where a property's website can get ahead of the OTA, because the OTA knows how to talk about rooms but not about what there is to do in the area.
Recommended reading: SEO for hotels, Google Ads for hotels and tourism marketing.
Protecting your name pays back first
Someone searching for your property by name has already chosen you. If an OTA ad sits at the top of that search, the booking that was about to come in direct turns into a booking with commission.
Booking bids on 2,099 paid keywords in the UK, and property names are among them. Protecting your own name with a dedicated campaign costs little, because Quality Score on your own brand is high and the clicks are few, and it is the fastest-returning move in the whole sector.
The second defence is rate parity as the guest sees it: if the price on your website is identical to the OTA's, there is no reason to book with you. You need a visible difference, and it doesn't have to be a discount: breakfast included, more flexible cancellation, a better room for the same price, all of which cost less than 15%.
What to measure
One metric tells you whether the work is paying off: the share of room nights sold direct out of the total, month by month. Website traffic is worthless if that percentage doesn't move.
Alongside it, watch the cost per direct booking, compared with the average commission paid to OTAs, and the actions on your Google Business Profile, which for proximity searches are the first sign of visibility.
Frequently asked questions
Can I leave the OTAs?
It is rarely worth it. With the visibility they have, leaving means disappearing for everyone who doesn't know you. The realistic goal is to move a few percentage points of bookings to direct each year, not to shut the channel down.
Does a small property really need a website?
It needs one as the place to close the booking for people already looking for you, and for destination content. It won't get you discovered on "hotel + town": that results page belongs to the OTAs and you won't win it back.
How much does the Google Business Profile matter for a hotel?
A lot for proximity searches, which reach 2,240,000 a month in summer for hotels alone. It is also where your direct price can appear next to the OTA prices, if the property is connected.
Is it better to invest in content or in ads?
Both, but in order: first the campaign on your own name, which pays for itself within weeks, then destination content, which works from six months onwards.
Do OTA reviews affect Google?
Not organic rankings directly, but they appear in the comparison boxes Google shows above the results, so guests see them anyway. Look after them on every channel, not only the one that brings the most bookings.
Where to start
Take the commission you paid last year and divide it by twelve. That figure is your real marketing budget, and you have almost certainly never called it that. Then search for your property's name on Google: if an OTA ad is at the top, you are paying commission on guests who were already on their way to you. These are the two checks every serious conversation about the direct channel starts from. If you'd like to go through them together, get in touch.
