What you can afford to give away

This will not tell you your channel commission bill and stop there. That number is $64,392 a year here, and no independent house has ever delisted over it. It tells you the largest discount you can put in a loyalty email and still keep more than the channel leaves you, which is a thing you can do on Monday.

The direct discount you can afford

16.5%

$34.60 off tonight's $210 rate, the most you can give a direct guest and still net at least what an OTA booking nets you on the same room-night.

Net per direct booking, full rate

$180.09

before any discount is offered

Net per OTA booking

$148.15

after commission and cancellations

Advantage, direct over OTA

$31.94

per room-night, at full rate

Discount you're considering for a direct guest: 10%

At 10% off, a direct booking still nets $160.71, ahead of the $148.15 an OTA booking nets you.

OTA commission: 17%

What a plain commission calculator shows$64,392 a year in OTA commission

Room-nights sold a year3109.8

OTA bookings a year1803.68

Direct bookings a year1306.12

Fixed direct-channel cost, per booking$2.76

30% of direct bookings are assumed to only exist because the guest saw this property on an OTA first: that share of direct's edge is not really independent of the OTA listing. Adjusted for it, the genuinely incremental advantage of a direct booking at today's rate is $22.35 a room-night, not the full $31.94 above.

This treats every OTA contract as one flat commission with no rate-parity clause, and every cancellation as a room-night nobody ever resells. A property bound by a parity clause may not be free to publish this discount on its own site at all, even where the arithmetic favours it, and a property that regularly resells cancelled rooms is paying less for cancellations than this model assumes. It is an estimate from the figures entered, not a rate strategy.