Industry · Hospitality

Every booking an OTA sends you costs up to 30 cents on the dollar. Every direct booking we build you keeps the full 100.

The experience begins long before arrival.

The Landscape

Where this market stands

Australia's tourism industry is valued at an estimated $213.2 billion in 2026 across around 101,000 businesses, having grown at a striking 9.8% CAGR since 2021 as the sector fully recovered from pandemic-era shutdowns, and the investment pipeline behind it is substantial, with 363 tourism projects worth $74.5 billion currently underway nationally.

That recovery has been uneven across the sector: accommodation providers are competing not just with each other but with online travel agents that now mediate a large share of bookings, while hospitality venues face rising costs and a guest base that researches almost entirely on mobile before making a decision.

$213.2bn

Australian tourism industry, 2026

SRC · IBISWorld

9.8%

Tourism industry CAGR, 2021-2026

SRC · IBISWorld

$74.5bn

Value of Australia's active tourism investment pipeline (363 projects)

SRC · Tourism Research Australia

The Signal

What the data says

Travel and hospitality ads post some of the strongest engagement of any vertical: click-through rates as high as 8.24% on Google Ads, the highest of any industry measured, but that traffic is expensive to hold onto. OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia typically charge 15-30% commission per booking, which means every guest acquired through a third-party platform arrives at a structurally lower margin than one acquired directly.

The gap between the two is a conversion-rate problem as much as a channel problem. Travel sites converting above 2% sit in the top 20% of the industry, and 3-4% puts a property in the top 10%, so the return on winning a guest directly (rather than renting their attention from an OTA) compounds every time the booking engine improves.

15%-30%

Typical commission charged by major OTAs per booking

SRC · Hotel distribution industry data

8.24%

Average Google Ads click-through rate for travel & hospitality, highest of any industry

SRC · Industry Google Ads benchmarks

2%-4%

Conversion rate range separating top 20% from top 10% of travel websites

SRC · Industry conversion benchmarks

The Friction

What gets in the way

Three hospitality businesses, three different battles. Accommodation fights the OTAs: Booking.com and Expedia take 15-30% commission, control the guest data, and even bid on the hotel's own brand name, so the property funds its own disintermediation. Restaurants and venues fight the platforms twice, delivery apps taking up to 30-35% of an order and reservation platforms owning the diner relationship. Tour and experience operators fight seasonality and review dependence, where a TripAdvisor position can be the whole demand curve.

Underneath all three sits the same structural weakness: no owned audience. Guest data lives in the OTA's CRM, the POS or the booking platform, not in an email list the operator controls, so every soft season and every algorithm change hits full force with nothing to re-engage. Rate-parity clauses and 'book direct' offers go unmarketed, so guests never learn there's a better deal on the operator's own site.

And the margin leaks compound quietly: a slow, non-mobile booking flow that converts at half the OTA's rate, no pre-arrival upsell, no post-stay review engine, no re-booking campaign, and food photography that undersells the product on the exact channels (Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps) where the next guest is deciding tonight's booking.

Our Approach

How we work in Hospitality

01
Rebuild the direct booking engine: a fast, mobile-first website, booking-flow conversion rate optimisation and visible book-direct incentives, because every point of conversion recovered is margin taken straight back from OTA commission.
02
Defend and capture demand: brand-defence Google Ads (stop paying commission on guests who searched your name), high-intent campaign terms, and metasearch presence that routes traffic to the owned booking path.
03
Run a visual content engine: food, room and experience photography, short-form video and an Instagram/TikTok cadence that matches how guests actually choose venues, amplified with paid social to postcode-level audiences.
04
Build the owned audience: email and SMS lifecycle marketing, pre-arrival upsells, post-stay review requests, off-season win-backs, birthday and loyalty campaigns, so past guests book direct instead of re-entering the OTA funnel.
05
Dominate the local layer: Google Business Profile, review velocity and Local SEO for '[cuisine] restaurant [suburb]' and 'hotel [destination]' searches, where Maps position converts to covers and room nights the same day.