Case study · anonymised
42-room beach resort in the Algarve: direct booking share lifted from 18% to 34% in 9 months
42-room beach resort, leisure-led, Algarve coast, ADR ~EUR 165, occupancy ~76% peak / ~52% shoulder
The challenge
The resort had been 100% reliant on Booking.com and Expedia for nine years, with direct share stuck at 18%. The legacy booking engine on the website converted at less than 0.6%, well below the segment benchmark. The general manager wanted to lift direct share to 30% within twelve months without cutting OTA volume.
The approach
The team replaced the legacy booking engine with SiteMinder, rebuilt the website on WordPress with a hotel-focused theme, and launched Google Hotel Ads (paid CPC plus free booking links) once the booking engine reached a stable 2.5%+ conversion. The deliberate choice was sequencing: booking engine first, then ads. The team also enabled rate parity monitoring via the SiteMinder Insights add-on to catch parity drift before OTAs penalised the listing.
Measured outcomes
Direct booking share
Before: 18% of total room nights
After: 34% of total room nights (month 9)
Booking engine conversion rate
Before: ~0.6%
After: ~3.1% on desktop, ~2.4% on mobile
Google Hotel Ads ROAS
Before: n/a (no ads)
After: ~8.5x on EUR 1,200 monthly ad spend
The failure pattern and the fix
The naive sequencing would have been to launch Hotel Ads first and "see what happens." That fails because the ad spend pours into a leaky checkout funnel and ROAS sits below break-even. The team instead spent the first three months purely on booking engine and website work, ran a four-week soft launch with the new engine before any ad spend, and only then enabled the metasearch ads. The other near-failure was a metasearch parity dispute when the booking engine showed EUR 4 lower than Booking.com for a week; SiteMinder Insights flagged it on day two and the team fixed the rate plan before Booking.com penalised the property.
What we took away
The lesson from this property is that the shift from OTA-dependent to direct-led is not one decision; it is a sequence. The booking engine swap on its own would not have moved direct share materially; the Google Hotel Ads on a poor engine would have lost money. Doing both in the right order produced compound results. Direct-booking economics also unlocked a new advantage: the resort started using its post-stay email list (built from direct guests) to drive 11% of off-peak repeat bookings in year two.
Anonymisation note
This case study uses anonymised property data: segment, room-count band, market region, and outcome metrics. The property is not named. Operator-reported figures are presented with that framing; published industry benchmarks are cited inline.