We are not against the platforms. For a new business with no audience they do something genuinely difficult, which is put you in front of someone who has never heard of you. The problem is what happens on the second booking, and the fifth, and the twentieth.
1 · Run the number on your own business
Take your average booking, multiply by the commission rate you pay, then multiply by the number of bookings a month that came from customers who already knew your name. That last figure is the one that stings, because it is money paid to be introduced to people you had already met.
2 · A worked example from this year
A short-let operator we built for lets nineteen apartments, with nightly rates starting at eighty-nine pounds and a typical night around a hundred and seventy-nine. At fifteen per cent, every direct night instead of a platform night is roughly twenty-seven pounds kept. That is before you count the guest's email address, which the platform keeps and you do not.
3 · The customer list is the real asset
Commission is the visible cost. The invisible one is that the platform owns the relationship, so you cannot invite anyone back, announce anything, or build a repeat habit. You start every month from zero and pay again for the same people.
4 · Direct does not mean leaving
Most of our clients run both, deliberately. The platforms do discovery, the site does repeat. The work is making sure anyone who searches your name by hand finds a site that is faster and easier to book than the listing they came from.
5 · Make direct the obviously better option
Be cheaper by roughly what you are saving and say so plainly, keep the booking on your own domain rather than redirecting to something that looks like a stranger's checkout, and make cancellation terms clearer than the platform's. People book direct when direct is better, not because they were asked to.