The real cost of a new hotel guest (and how to lower it)
Between OTAs, ads and staff time, a new guest costs more than you think. Here's how to put a number on it and bring it down.
Ask a hotelier what a new guest costs. Most will name an OTA commission, 15 or 18%, and leave it there. That’s a mistake. The commission is only the visible part. The real acquisition cost, the one quietly eating your margin, is much wider.
What you actually pay
Take a room sold at €120 through a platform. A 17% commission is already €20. Add VAT, housekeeping, the free breakfast you threw in to win the booking, your receptionist’s time, the slice of your ad budget that pushed that guest to click. Add it all up, divide by the number of guests you genuinely won over the period. The figure usually stings: €30, €40, sometimes €50 for a single new guest. On a one-night stay, your margin melts.
The one-night trap
A guest who comes only once almost never pays back their acquisition cost. Profitability shows up on the second stay, the third, or when they bring someone else. That’s the whole game: stop paying full price for strangers and start putting your past guests to work. A happy guest who returns costs you a fraction of an OTA guest. A guest who refers another one, even less.
Lowering the cost, in practice
Referral is the most profitable lever, and the most neglected. This is where the postcard earns its place. At the end of the stay, your guest sends a real card in your colours — not to themselves, to the people close to them. Family, friends, colleagues. Those people resemble them: same kind of budget, same appetite for weekends away or holidays. That’s the statistical twin, and it’s exactly the audience you pay dearly to reach with ads. Except here, the recommendation comes from a friend, not a banner. It carries a weight no ad will ever have.
The card lands in a mailbox, ends up on a fridge, and stays there for years. All that time, your name sits in front of a future guest, day after day, with nothing more to pay. Printed and posted in France, it costs a few euros — compare that to the €40 of an OTA guest.
Measure before you spend
Before putting another euro into a channel, work out what it really returns. Our ROI calculator gives you, in minutes, the real cost of a booking and the return on a referral action. You’ll decide on numbers, not on habit.
Cutting your acquisition cost isn’t about spending less everywhere. It’s about moving budget out of cold acquisition and into what keeps guests loyal and gets them talking. For the same margin, that means more nights on the books and fewer commissions paid out.