Monthly Archives: February 2026

Packages, Not Price Cuts: The Faster Path to More Direct Hotel Sales

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During my 40-year travel career as a tour operator and, latterly, as the CEO of On Holiday Group, I have spent a lot of time with beach hoteliers and have some good friends who are still operating successful hotel chains.

A key topic of discussion has always been the “Love: Hate” relationship hoteliers have with Booking.com, the consumer favourite hotel booking site. Given Booking’s extensive SEO history and strong PPC bids on Google, they often appear above or just below any direct hotel adverts and strive to enforce their price parity demands to ensure that hotels’ direct prices do not undercut their own site’s prices.

This means that bookings often account for over 40% of hotel sales, with commissions ranging from 16% to 25%, providing the hotel with a strong incentive to increase direct bookings and reduce this lost margin. This incentive is further enhanced when booking offers its “pay at the hotel” option, as many customers use it to make speculative or back-up bookings, which generate high revenue and reduce no-shows!

However, many hotels still make basic mistakes when operating in source markets outside their home country.

1.        Not offering “£ Sterling” Prices.

Research by Shopify states that 49% of UK customers will not purchase if prices are not in sterling, which seems a bit high, but when OHG managed booking sites for hotel partners, we increased hotel-only conversions by 35% by offering Sterling pricing.

2.        Not offering Flight Inclusive packages.

Google research shows that although 60% of customers searching for hotels want to book only a hotel, 40% would book a flight-and-hotel package if offered. As I often say to my hotel friends, “How do you think UK customers get to your hotel? They don’t swim!” Not offering holidaymakers the option to buy a package is therefore the biggest barrier to direct bookings for hotels

3.        Create free “upgrades” for direct bookings.

Assuming you need to honour Booking’s price parity guarantees, be clever and incentivise direct bookings by:

a. Priority access to late check-outs. The biggest hassle for any guest is checking out at 11 am for an evening flight. Every room needs to be cleaned and prepared, but it’s easy to clean rooms for late-afternoon arrivals to create late check-out options. Direct bookers should be given priority access to these.

b. Best Sun beds. Upgrade the hotel’s best sun beds with comfier cushions and only give access to them to your loyalty club of direct bookers.

c. Digital Rep. My business https://travelvoice.co.uk/ has created AI Holiday Reps accessible via customers’ phones using WhatsApp that can be promoted via QR codes around the hotel, which cost just 15p a minute of use and can advise customers not only about the hotel’s facilities but also about local bars, restaurants, taxis, buses, and attractions.

4.        Managing Brand Term pages.

It’s vital that the hotel’s marketing department knows how to use VPNs to log in to Google from the UK so they can see what UK customers are seeing, not just what they see in their local market. The two are rarely the same!

They will quickly see which third-party brands are appearing above them in search results, which is madness, as it is relatively cheap for a hotel owner to use PPC to appear in the all-important top spot on model for their brand term, rather than just appear halfway down the page in the SEO results.

Secondly, in the UK, Google Hotels often hog the limelight on desktops by comparing prices per night from multiple suppliers, and you will be amazed at how often a third party undercuts the hotel’s direct site rates. This needs monitoring!

5.        Create a Digital Word of Mouth.

Most hotels understand the importance of Tripadvisor and Google reviews and chase these hard; however, the review game is stepping up a gear with AI Voice review agents interviewing returning customers to automatically write well-crafted reviews pre-seeded with direct booking recommendation and links that the customer then posts to Tripadvisor, Trust Pilot and Google with a single click to making it both the easiest and most effective review driver for a hotel.

Incentivising customers to leave reviews by entering them into a draw to win a free week at the hotel is logical and not against anyone’s review rules.

TSN: the quick and easy Packaging Solution

Garry and Lindsey Winterburn set up Travel Solutions Network (TSN) https://travelsolutionsnetwork.co.uk/ in 2022 to provide a “Cloud Computing” equivalent for travel call centre support, by creating virtual call centres staffed by experienced native-English travel homeworkers who fully understand the marketplace and who support multiple partners, answering 90% plus of calls even in peaks.

TSN scaled their business rapidly by delivering high-converting call centres to partners such as Easyjet Holidays, Etihad Holidays, and, more recently, to several luxury hotel groups.

The hotel packaging service is extremely simple to implement.

Hotels just add a Telephone number to the top of the site labelled “Call for Flight and Hotel Packages”, which is then answered by a hotel-branded TSN-supplied travel agent, who uses the TSN booking tools to package the holiday priced in Sterling and using TSN UK ATOL licence.

The Hotel automatically increases its direct bookings by 40% and only pays a commission per booking based on booking success, with no fixed staff overhead or hourly rates to worry about.

The commission is significantly lower than Booking’s, with nearly zero cancellations, as customers have committed to flights and TSN pays the hotel much earlier using virtual cards from its trust-fund-protected client account.

To be honest, I think this is the simplest way for any holiday hotel to increase its direct sales, so if you’re interested, get in touch with TSN and email them at info@Travelsolutionsnetwork.co.uk

Meanwhile, consider all my other suggestions as well, as these elements are entirely within your control.

The Death of Travel Websites as We Know Them (Thanks to AI Search)

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AI Search needs to evolve quickly, as it is currently a loss-making black hole: neither ChatGPT nor Perplexity is profitable, and Gemini is dramatically impacting Google’s PPC revenues, with a negative knock-on effect on profits.

The entire ethos of AI search is to guide customers to an answer more quickly, generating high-intent customers who are better suited to a “Cost per Acquisition” (CPA) or retail model like Amazon.

Anthropic signalled the first major move in this direction with the creation of its MCP (Model Context Protocol), which is simply a standardisation “Brick” that suppliers must connect their API’s too, so that “Large Language Models” (LLMs) can hoover them up to build super stores with.

However, last month, Google went a step further, launching its new UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), a standardised way for retailers to connect to Gemini or other LLMs to enable agentic commerce, allowing AI agents to perform product discovery, manage carts, checkout, payments, order tracking, and post-purchase flows.

The key point is that UCP shifts the transaction point from the retailer’s website to within the AI search itself to optimise user intent and reduce booking friction caused by the current need to visit the retailer’s site. The retailer remains the merchant of record and receives the customer’s details; however, fewer human customers will visit the retailer’s site, as most traffic comes from APIs and machines.

So, how will this impact travel businesses?

Clearly, businesses must set up a “Merchant Centre” account with Google and deploy their own UCP servers, though this process is relatively simple. However, what businesses often need from consultants like my own “Neural River” is insight into the wider implications of this change and guidance on what they should prepare for next.

For example, AI Search engines are “conversational” and, unlike travel sites, don’t use “order form” searches to obtain the key search data such as departure date, airport, destination, etc. Instead, they will handle a word-based search, such as “Find me cheap all-inclusive deals to Alcudia in Majorca, for a family of 2 adults and two children, departing on the 12th of July from Manchester airport”.

Now, you may spot a usability issue straight away. That’s a lot of typing!

This is why all AI search engines are rapidly shifting to promote voice search, where users simply chat with the search engine about their needs, as demonstrated by last week’s Uber Eats new voice service.

Initially, there will be some resistance to this move among the “Betamax” generation of 20-30-year-olds, who have been trained only to interact via typing, but the convenience factor will quickly change user behaviour.

The shift to voice will also broaden the query string and introduce more holiday requirements that responses need to meet, such as reliable Wi-Fi, kids’ clubs, and quality restaurants and bars near the hotel.

However, the biggest change is that AI engines will demand “Recommendations” rather than thousands of options, as they want to guide customers to a decision and complete the transaction quickly. So less is more

Also, as “Digital Twins” develop on customers’ phones that know all their key preferences, tagging properties as suitable for XYZ and creating “lookalike” customer groups, where a “Customer like you enjoyed this holiday” will become a key conversion driver.

Therefore, exploring new methods to gather rich user content like Travel Voices’ “Digital Holiday Books” is important for both driving “Friend get Friend” referral sales and creating an extensive database of customer reviews, where new users can talk via AI to previous customers about their holidays.

Travel search is poised for a major evolution, with voice search and recommendations replacing the standard online search forms that are the core of every current travel website.

Are you ready for this shift?