A guest books two nights at your lodge through Booking.com. Your rate is UGX 400,000 a night, so the reservation is worth UGX 800,000. After an 18% commission the payout lands at UGX 656,000. The beds were occupied, the staff were paid, and the platform took UGX 144,000 for the introduction.
Commission is charged on the room rate, not on what you keep. It is the one line on a hotel cost sheet that grows every time you sell a room, and it never comes down on its own.
What OTA commission actually costs you
Most properties we speak to pay between 15% and 25% of the room rate, depending on the platform, the rate plan and how much visibility they bought. In shillings, it looks like this.
| Monthly bookings through OTAs | At 15% | At 18% | At 25% |
|---|---|---|---|
| UGX 10M | UGX 1.5M | UGX 1.8M | UGX 2.5M |
| UGX 20M | UGX 3.0M | UGX 3.6M | UGX 5.0M |
| UGX 40M | UGX 6.0M | UGX 7.2M | UGX 10.0M |
A property doing UGX 20M a month through platforms and paying 18% hands over UGX 3.6M monthly, which is UGX 43.2M a year. For most hotels that single figure is larger than the marketing budget, the training budget and the maintenance budget combined.
A hotel running at a 35% net margin gives up roughly half its profit on every OTA booking. On a UGX 400,000 room, an 18% commission of UGX 72,000 eats 51% of the UGX 140,000 you would have kept. Cutting commission is a profit project before it is a marketing project.
Why most Ugandan hotels stay on the treadmill
The usual answer is payments. Cards are still thin here and domestic guests overwhelmingly pay by mobile money, so if your website cannot take MTN MoMo, Airtel Money and a card in one flow, travellers fall back to the platform that already holds their card details. Trust matters too: a guest who has never heard of your lodge wants reviews and cancellation protection before sending money across a border. The mistake is assuming only the OTA can provide that, when real photos, verified reviews and a secure payment page do most of the same work.
The quieter reason is that direct bookings only happen when someone minds the channel. Enquiries arrive at 2am. If the reply comes the next afternoon, the booking goes to whoever answered first.
Six moves that shift bookings to your own site
- Put a real booking engine on your site, with live availability, nightly rates and instant confirmation. A contact form and a WhatsApp link are not a booking engine.
- Accept mobile money as a first class payment method, with a card gateway for international guests. A 30% deposit converts far better than demanding payment in full.
- Match the platform rate and add value instead. Many OTA contracts include rate parity terms, so promising a permanently cheaper rate is a risk. Offer the airport pickup, the breakfast, the late checkout.
- Clean up your Google presence. Complete your Google Business Profile with real photos, accurate rates and replies to every review, then add the booking link so guests land on your calendar instead of a search page full of competitors.
- Use WhatsApp the way Ugandans do. Saved replies for the ten questions you answer daily, a catalog of room types with prices, and a rule that enquiries get answered within minutes.
- Keep the guest list. Collect an email address or phone number with every booking and follow up 30 or 60 days later with a direct rate. Repeat guests cost no commission.
What a direct booking website costs in Uganda
We publish our prices, so compare them against the commission figures above rather than against another agency quote.
- A website build starts at UGX 3M one time, covering design, hosting, domain and SSL.
- The monthly growth retainer runs UGX 2M to 3M a month for SEO, content, updates and design work.
- The Direct Booking Machine is UGX 11M to 19M for setup plus UGX 5.5M a month, covering the booking engine, SEO, Google Business Profile management, review generation, ads management and WhatsApp and email follow up. A reduced retainer plus 5% to 8% of direct bookings is available for smaller properties, and the guarantee is 20 direct booking inquiries within 90 days or we keep working at no extra charge.
The full breakdown is on our pricing page, with more on how we handle hospitality on the hotels and lodges page.
The break-even arithmetic
Take a hotel selling rooms at UGX 350,000 a night and paying 18% commission. Every booking that arrives through your own site keeps UGX 63,000 in the business. One extra direct booking a week is UGX 3.3M over a year, and two a week is UGX 6.6M. A UGX 3M build pays for itself inside the first year at one extra booking a week, and the saving repeats every year after.
Red flags when you buy a booking website
Many OTA agreements contain rate parity terms. Before you advertise a lower rate on your own site, or let an agency promise you will undercut the platform, read the contract you signed. A suspended listing costs far more than the commission you were trying to save.
A booking engine that does not connect to your channel manager or property management system, because that is how double bookings happen. A quote with no mobile money support. A handover with no training and no login to change your own rates. And any promise of a specific number of bookings from an agency that has not seen your occupancy data and reviews.
Questions hoteliers ask us
Will pushing direct bookings hurt my ranking on the platforms?
No. Keep your OTA listings live, priced and competitive. A guest who finds you on a platform and books direct next time is a win, not a loss.
How long before direct bookings grow?
Expect 60 to 90 days before a new site and a completed Google Business Profile produce consistent enquiries. That is the window our guarantee is built around.
Do I need a new site, or can you add a booking engine to the one I have?
It depends. If your site is slow, awkward on a phone, or nobody can edit it, a rebuild is usually cheaper than wiring a booking engine into it. We will say which you need after we look, and sometimes the answer is neither.
What to do this month
- Pull three months of OTA statements and add up the commission. That number is your budget.
- Try to book a room on your own website at 11pm on a phone, and time how long it takes.
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile if that is not already done.
- Get one quote for a booking engine and set it against twelve months of commission.
None of that requires a decision today. It puts a number on a cost most owners never look at closely. If you want a second opinion on yours, see how we work or send us your current site.