You Already Won the Customer. Now Stop Paying Commission on Them
Somebody finds you on a booking platform, likes the look of you, and then does what almost everyone does: opens a new tab and searches your name to see the real place. What they find there decides whether they book with you or go back and book through the platform that charges you fifteen to twenty-five per cent. The visibility was already won. The margin is what is still on the table.
No credit card required · 30-minute call · No obligation to sign up
Six things that follow from renting your own customers
Every one of these comes from the same arrangement: a third party sits between you and a guest who, in most cases, already wanted to come to you.
- The platform charges per bookingA ranking win is a margin win, not a traffic win
- Your own name is the key queryThe verification search before they commit
- You are bidding against yourselfPlatforms buy your brand name in paid search
- Photographs are the productAnd the platform’s are usually better than yours
- Demand is a calendarSeasonal, event-driven, and it will not wait
- Reviews sit on somebody else’s siteRead before your website is ever opened
The third row surprises operators who have never looked. Search your own venue name and count the paid results above your website. Frequently the platforms are bidding on it, using the brand you built, to resell you a guest who was already coming. You cannot stop that, but you can make sure the organic result underneath is unmistakably better than the listing, with the direct rate visible before anyone has to click.
The number that matters is commission not paid
Hospitality is the one sector on this site where the SEO win is measured in money kept rather than customers gained. A hotel taking a hundred bookings a month through a platform at twenty per cent commission is paying a substantial monthly fee to be introduced to people who, in a large share of cases, searched its name before booking. Shifting even a fifth of those to direct is worth more than most traffic growth, and it does not require ranking for a single competitive term.
That reframes what the work is. The queries that matter are your own name, your name plus the town, your name plus "direct", and the questions somebody asks in the final minutes before committing: parking, check-in time, whether the rate includes breakfast, whether the room actually looks like that. Those are low-volume, unglamorous searches that no keyword tool prioritises, and they are where the margin is decided.
The rest is discovery, and there the platforms genuinely do own the results. Nobody is outranking the major booking sites for "hotels in London" and it is not worth the budget to try. What is winnable is everything specific: the neighbourhood, the occasion, the particular need — a family room near a station, a venue that takes dogs, somewhere open late after a show. Those searches are smaller, far less contested, and bring people who convert because they described exactly what they wanted and you were it.
For restaurants and venues the shape is the same with different intermediaries. The reservation platform, the delivery aggregator and the review site sit in the same position, taking a margin or holding the reputation. And in every case the local map result is decided before your website is opened at all, which makes the profile, the photographs and the hours a bigger lever than anything on the site itself.
- ✓Measure commission, not sessions — A booking moved from platform to direct is worth many times a new visitor.
- ✓Own the final-minute questions — Parking, check-in, what is included. Low volume, decisive timing.
- ✓Do not fight for discovery terms — The platforms have those. Specific need and occasion queries are open.
- ✓Your photographs are the product — And the aggregator’s are usually better. That is a fixable disadvantage.
- ✓The map result comes first — Profile, photos and hours decide the shortlist before the site is opened.
Most hospitality SEO briefs ask for more visibility. The guest was already found. What was lost was the twenty per cent.
What hospitality SEO actually involves
The disciplines are the same ones on the rest of this site. These are the six places an intermediary changes how they are done.
Brand SERP & Direct Booking
What appears when somebody searches your venue name, and whether the direct rate is visible before they have to click. This single result decides most of the commission question.
Map Profile & Local Presence
Hours, categories, photographs, attributes and reviews. The shortlist for every local search is decided here, entirely off your website, and it is usually half-finished.
Occasion & Need Content
Not "hotels in the city" but the specific thing somebody typed: dog-friendly, family rooms, late kitchen, near the venue. Smaller searches, far less contested, much better conversion.
Seasonal & Event Planning
Demand here is a calendar tied to holidays, events and local fixtures. Content has to be indexed weeks before the searches arrive, not during them.
Media & Performance
Photography is the product and image weight is the usual cause of a slow site. Serving it properly rather than serving less of it is the whole job.
Structured Data for Booking
Rates, availability, menus, opening hours and events marked up correctly so the search result itself carries the information a guest is checking.
Different intermediaries, the same squeeze
Each of these has a third party between the business and the customer, taking either a margin or the reputation. The work is getting to the guest before that intermediary does, or after it without paying again.
Hotels & serviced accommodation
The clearest commission case. Direct booking is the entire commercial argument, and the brand search is where it is won or lost.
Restaurants
Reservation platforms and review sites hold both the booking and the reputation. Menu, hours and photographs in the search result do more than the website does.
Bars, pubs & late venues
Almost entirely discovery-led and occasion-driven. A London hospitality group is a client here. Late opening and what is on tonight beat any keyword strategy.
Event & wedding venues
Long consideration, enormous transaction, and a searcher comparing five venues for months. This is the one part of hospitality where long-form content genuinely sells.
Attractions & experiences
Ticket aggregators in the intermediary role, and demand shaped hard by weather and school holidays.
Holiday lets & short stays
The platform is the market, and the brand barely exists independently. Building a searchable identity at all is the first job.
Who we have actually done this for
Anonymised at the client’s preference. No percentages appear against any of them — figures go up only when attributable to something a reader could check.
A London hospitality group
A real engagement carried without a name at the client’s preference. The work is theirs to publish, not ours.
Distill Ventures
Drinks rather than venues, and adjacent rather than the same. “It was a pleasure working with Ghalib and his team.” — Allie.
Independent venues
Often the strongest fit here. One venue, a real identity, and a brand search that can be owned completely rather than shared with a chain.
Where we are the wrong fit
If the brief is to outrank the major booking platforms for generic destination searches, we would tell you that is not achievable and where the budget belongs instead.
Venues with no photography
Worth saying plainly: in this sector the pictures are the product. If the platform’s photographs of your venue are better than yours, that is the first spend, before any SEO.
Groups with several sites
Each venue needs its own identity and its own local presence. A group site with six venues on one page competes for none of them.
What clients say
Named clients, named companies — published with their permission.
“It was a pleasure working with Ghalib and his team.”
“Highly professional and dedicated to achieving results.”
“Ghalib’s clear guidance has helped improve our website’s SEO performance.”
More of them, in full, on our reviews page.
— Our Proprietary Methodology —
The Visibility Framework™, applied to hospitality
The method is the same one every engagement here runs on. In hospitality, step one includes searching your own venue name and counting what sits above your website — because that is where the commission is decided.
Visibility Score™
We baseline the site and the map profile, then search your venue name as a guest would and record everything above your own result. Platforms bidding on your brand is the usual finding, and the usual surprise.
Custom Strategy
A keyword and content roadmap scoped to your niche and budget — which pages to fix, which to build, and which terms are worth the money here.
Execution
Senior strategists implement technical fixes, content and links as one roadmap — no juniors, no outsourcing, no handoffs between departments.
Track & Improve™
Monthly reporting and continuous optimization — we re-test what’s working, cut what isn’t, and adjust as the market moves.
Honest, No-Nonsense Commitment
No one controls Google or AI search — so we'll never guarantee a #1 ranking. What we do guarantee: if your visibility score doesn't improve within 90 days, we keep working at no extra cost until it does.
Hospitality SEO pricing
Scoped by the number of venues and how much of your volume currently arrives through platforms — you get the figure after a free audit, not before it. Prices below are USD; UK clients are quoted in GBP and Pakistani clients in PKR.
Starter
Single independent venues.
- Technical & media performance
- Map profile and brand result
- Monthly reporting
Growth
For venues shifting volume from platforms to direct.
- Everything in Starter, deeper execution
- Occasion and need content
- Booking structured data
- Bi-weekly reporting calls
Enterprise
Multi-venue groups and hotel portfolios.
- Dedicated senior strategist
- Per-venue local structure
- Seasonal and event planning
- Custom reporting dashboard
Hospitality engagements should be judged against commission avoided rather than against traffic. If the site cannot take a direct booking properly, that is the first fix and it is not an SEO invoice.
What you’re actually committing to
Most agencies keep this in a contract you only see after the sales call. We would rather you knew now, because it is the question everyone asks second — right after the price.
- A 3-month initial term, then month to monthLong enough for the 90-day guarantee above to mean something, short enough that you are not trapped if it doesn’t work out. The wider industry standard is 6 to 12 months.
- 30 days’ notice to stopNo exit fee and no buy-out of the months you haven’t used. You leave when you decide to, not when the contract lets you.
- No setup or onboarding feeThe audit is free, and month one costs exactly what month two costs. Nothing is front-loaded.
- You own everythingAnalytics, Search Console, content, accounts and any tooling set up for you — all in your name from day one, and all still yours if we part ways.
- One fixed monthly feeAnything outside the agreed scope is quoted and approved by you before it starts. It never appears on an invoice as a surprise.
- Reporting written to be readWhat changed, what it moved and what is next — in plain English, at the cadence set out in your plan, not a 40-page export nobody opens.
These are the terms as they appear in the agreement itself — nothing here is softened for the website. The full wording lives in our terms and conditions, and you get the agreement to read before anything is signed or invoiced.
What we will not do for a venue
Hospitality has one temptation above all others, and it is the reviews. They are visible, they are decisive, and they sit on platforms that are not yours.
We will not write, buy or incentivise reviews. Every major platform in this sector detects and penalises it, the penalty is applied to your listing rather than to the agency, and a venue that loses its review standing has lost the thing guests were actually reading. Asking genuine guests properly is a different matter and it works; we will help design that.
We will not publish menus, prices, opening hours or availability in structured data that does not match reality. In hospitality that information appears directly in the search result, so a wrong closing time is not a ranking issue — it is somebody standing outside a locked door.
And we will not build a page for every nearby landmark and neighbourhood a guest might search. A venue genuinely near three things is not near thirty, and a page for each is the doorway pattern with a tourist map attached.
- No bought or written reviews. The platforms detect it, and the penalty lands on your listing.
- Hours and menus must be true. They appear in the result itself. Wrong ones send people to a locked door.
- No landmark-by-landmark pages. Near three things, not thirty. The rest is a doorway pattern.
- Photography before optimisation. If the platform’s pictures beat yours, that is the first spend.
- Direct booking has to work. Moving bookings to a broken booking path costs more than the commission did.
Hospitality SEO questions, answered
Related SEO pages
Same service, different angle — by market, by discipline and by platform.
Paying commission on guests who searched for you by name?
Free 30-minute audit · No obligation · Response within 24 hours
Get in touch with Ghalib Ashrafi HQ
We're here to help you grow your business. Reach out today.