Case study · anonymised
85-room design hotel in Barcelona: booking engine swap doubles direct conversion
85-room boutique design hotel, leisure-led, Barcelona Eixample district, ADR ~EUR 215, occupancy ~78%, international guest mix
The challenge
The hotel had a beautiful brand website built three years earlier on a custom CMS with a legacy booking engine that converted at 1.4%. The OTA share had crept to 71% of total room nights because direct bookings simply did not happen at scale. The general manager attributed the issue to OTA dependency, but the revenue manager identified the conversion rate as the actual bottleneck.
The approach
The team replaced the legacy booking engine with the SiteMinder Hotel Booking Engine, kept the brand website (a Webflow rebuild was scheduled for the following year), and embedded the new engine via SiteMinder Direct integration. The deliberate sequencing was engine swap first, then a website content refresh, then Google Hotel Ads. Implementation took eight weeks: two weeks for SiteMinder onboarding, two weeks for embedding and rate-plan setup, four weeks for parallel running with the legacy engine before sunset.
Measured outcomes
Direct booking conversion rate
Before: 1.4%
After: 2.9% (month 4)
Direct share of total room nights
Before: 29%
After: 38% (month 6)
Annual direct revenue
Before: ~EUR 740,000
After: ~EUR 980,000 (annualised post-month-6)
Net commission savings (direct shift)
Before: n/a
After: ~EUR 38,000 annualised
The failure pattern and the fix
The near-failure was a multi-currency display issue in week three: the legacy engine had shown EUR rates to all visitors; SiteMinder defaulted to visitor-geo-based currency display, which surprised some return customers who had bookmarked the legacy currency view. The fix was a banner on the booking-engine top frame explaining currency conversion. The other near-failure was the conversion-rate spike showing 4.1% in week two; investigation showed cookie-tracking double-counting that resolved by week three to the steady 2.9% rate.
What we took away
The lesson is that booking-engine quality is the leading indicator for direct-booking share, not website design or marketing spend. The Webflow website rebuild that was scheduled for year two was delayed to year three because the existing site was performing adequately once the conversion bottleneck was fixed. The other lesson is that conversion-rate measurement requires careful tracking setup before drawing conclusions.
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.