The real cost of a commission on a BZ$200 night

Most owners know, roughly, that the booking sites take a cut. Fewer have sat down with a calculator and worked out what that cut adds up to over a season, and fewer still have separated the part that is fair payment from the part that is simply habit.

So let's do the arithmetic slowly, with a number that will feel familiar: a room at BZ$200 a night.

Do the sum slowly

Online travel agencies typically keep 15–18% of the nightly rate on each booking they bring. Booking.com's standard commission sits around 15%. Expedia's runs 18–22%. Both rise if you join a visibility programme such as Preferred Partner, which is how a property that thought it was paying 15% finds itself paying rather more.

Take a small place selling ten nights a month through the booking sites at BZ$200 a night. At 15–18%, the commission on those nights comes to roughly BZ$300–360 a month.

Now stretch it over a year. At the top of that range, you are looking at about BZ$4,320 leaving the business in commission.

That is the number worth sitting with. Not the percentage, which sounds modest, but the yearly figure, which does not. BZ$4,320 is a new mattress set and a paint job. It is a season of a part-time housekeeper's hours. In US terms — the Belize dollar is pegged at BZ$2 to US$1 — it is money your guests would recognise as real.

And ten nights a month is a quiet month for many properties in Placencia or San Pedro. Scale the same arithmetic to a fourteen-room lodge in Cayo in February and the figure grows in proportion.

The booking sites are not the enemy

Here is where a lot of commission talk goes wrong, so let me be plain about it.

A booking site that puts your guesthouse in front of a family in Toronto who had never heard of Hopkins has done something genuinely valuable. They spent money on advertising to find that family. They handled the first contact. They carry the risk that the family books somewhere else entirely. The 15–18% on that booking is a fee for work done, and it is not outrageous.

The waste is elsewhere.

The expensive bookings are not the ones the OTA found you. They are the ones the OTA simply intercepted.

Think about who actually books through those sites. Some are strangers. But a good number are:

• Repeat guests who stayed with you last year and remembered your name, then typed it into a booking site because that is where they book everything.
• Guests sent by a tour operator, a dive shop, or a neighbouring property that was full.
• People who read about you in a guidebook or a Facebook group, searched your name, and landed on a listing page rather than a site of your own.
• Guests who found you on the booking site, then looked for your own website, failed to find one worth trusting, and went back.

On every one of those, you pay the same 15–18% as you do on the genuine stranger. The site did not find that guest. It was standing in the doorway when the guest arrived.

That is the portion worth going after. Not all of it — just the part you were paying twice for.

What a flat fee looks like next to a percentage

The difference between the two models is simple: commission grows with every night you sell, a flat fee does not.

Direct Belize is billed monthly: Starter is BZ$119 a month for one to six rooms, Growth is BZ$279 for seven to fourteen, Pro is BZ$479 for fifteen to twenty-five. Annual billing includes one month free and waives the setup fee; monthly billing carries a one-time BZ$499 setup fee. Extra booking channels beyond the five included are BZ$29 a month each. Bookings made through your own site carry 0% commission on every plan.

Put the Starter plan beside the worked example above. Twelve months at BZ$119 comes to less than half of that BZ$4,320 in commission — and unlike the commission, it does not move when you have a good March.

That comparison is not a promise that your commission bill disappears. It will not. You will still want the booking sites working for you, and you will still pay them on the guests they find. The five included channels — Booking.com, Expedia with Hotels.com, Airbnb, Vrbo and Google — stay in sync with your calendar precisely so you can keep selling through them without double bookings.

The change is on the other side: when a repeat guest from Corozal or a referral from a Punta Gorda tour operator goes looking for you, there is a direct booking site with your rates, your photographs and a real availability calendar waiting for them. That booking costs you nothing in commission.

How to work out your own number

Don't take the BZ$200 example as gospel. Take twenty minutes with your own figures.

• Pull your commission invoices or statements for the last twelve months and add them up. That is your real annual number, not an estimate.
• Go through last year's arrivals and mark the ones who had stayed before, or who mentioned a referral, or who said they had been meaning to come for ages.
• Work out what you paid in commission on that second group. That is the figure a direct site is competing against.
• Compare it with a year of the plan that matches your room count.

If the second group is small, the booking sites are earning their money and you should keep feeding them. If it is a meaningful slice of your bookings — and for most established properties in Belize it is — then the arithmetic starts to look different.

Either way, you will know. And knowing the number is worth the twenty minutes on its own.

If you want to see which plan fits your room count before you do the sums, the figures are all on the pricing page.