True Cost of an OTA Booking vs Direct

Commission: is what an OTA charges on a stay. It appears on a statement, it's expressed as a percentage of room revenue, and it's the only figure most properties can quote from memory. It is also the smallest of the three.

Direct acquisition cost is what it costs you to produce a booking on your own channel. Unlike commission it doesn't arrive as a single number. It sits across media spend, metasearch bids, booking engine licences and per-transaction fees, the website itself, CRM, payment processing, and the fraction of someone's salary spent operating all of it. Nobody sends you an invoice for the total, which is why so few properties know it.

Total cost per realised booking is the one that belongs in a decision. It counts every cost the channel incurs, divided by the bookings that actually arrive and pay, not the bookings that were made. Cancellations, no-shows, and rebookings sit between those two figures and they don't sit there evenly across channels.