Cutting dependence on online travel agents for hill-stay bookings

Suppose an Ahmedabad family loves your corner room over the Diwali holidays and books again the next Diwali. They come through the same portal, and you pay commission twice on guests who already knew your name. That is the booking to win back. Keep the portals for guests who have never heard of you. For everyone who has stayed, build a list with their home city, the holiday they travel in and their permission, and send one personal message before they start planning. The second stay, and the friends they bring, should come to you direct.

Which bookings should stay with the portals?

Portals earn their commission on guests who would never have found you. Think of a couple from Pune searching for a cottage near Manali, a backpacker from abroad, or the last-minute Tuesday booking that fills an empty room. Fighting for those costs more than it returns.

The decision rule is short. If the guest has stayed with you before, was sent by someone who did, or is booking three or more rooms for a family or a group, that booking should come direct. Everyone else can arrive through whichever portal they like. Making your own website as easy to book as a portal is the other half of the work, covered in how to increase hotel direct bookings.

There is one place this does not pay. A property on a transit route, where bikers heading for Spiti or Leh stop for a night and never pass again, has few repeat guests to list. Put that effort into your Google profile and reviews instead.

Where the guest's number goes missing

A portal booking may reach you with a relay address, or with no contact you can use after the stay, so the clean route is the front desk: at check-in or checkout, ask for a WhatsApp number and permission to send one message before next season. The wording of that question and the register behind it are set out in getting direct bookings when the booking app takes a cut, and need not be repeated here.

What a hill property adds is the note beside the number: home city, the holiday they came in, who came (a couple, parents, three families together), and the one thing they asked for, such as Jain food, a ground-floor room for an elder or an extra heater.

Sort your register by origin before you message anyone

Open your own register first, and mark each guest's home state and the month they stayed. That tells you when each group planned, which no general pattern can. Hill guests in Himachal Pradesh arrive from different states in different months.

What you may find, and should check against your own bookings, is that Gujarat families booked several rooms together well before the Diwali holidays and asked about Jain and vegetarian food first, Delhi guests booked late for long weekends, and Punjab families came by car in the summer break. If your register shows that, one message to everyone on one date suits few of them. Send each group its message a little before its own planning month, and the snow list its message when the first snow is reported.

The message that brings a guest back direct

Send it from the owner's business number, one guest at a time, naming something real about their stay:

Namaste Mehta ji, this is Rajesh from [hotel name], Naggar. You stayed with us last Diwali with your parents, in the corner room with the orchard view. We are taking bookings for the coming Diwali holidays. If the hills are in your plans, reply here and I will hold the same room for two days while you decide. Guests who book with us direct get pickup from the bus stop at Patlikuhal and early check-in after the overnight drive. If you would rather not hear from us, reply "stop".

The inclusion matters more than it looks. Pickup and an early room cost you little, and after a night on the road they mean a great deal. They give the guest a reason to book direct without starting a price fight with your own portal listing. A discount does the opposite: it teaches the guest to wait for one.

Make sure your own name leads to you

A past guest who wants to come back searches your hotel's name on Google, not the portal. If your Google Business Profile shows an old number, a website link that goes to a portal page, or no WhatsApp at all, that repeat booking leaks straight back to commission. Check it from a phone, as a guest would, and fix every link that does not end with you.

For example: the hotel that sent one offer to everyone

For example, imagine an invented 14-room hotel in Naggar. The owner exports every number in the phone, guests, drivers, vendors and staff mixed together, and sends one broadcast, "Diwali offer, book now", three days before Diwali. The Gujarat families booked weeks earlier. The drivers reply asking about payments. A few guests block the number.

The next season the owner does it properly. The owner builds the list from the register and the checkout question, keeping only guests who agreed, splits it by home state and by the holiday they came in, and writes each message personally, naming the room and who they travelled with. The Gujarat messages go out before the school holidays are fixed, the Delhi ones before each long weekend. Far fewer messages go out than the first time, and the replies come from people who remember the room. In this illustration only 9 of 60 messages produced a booking in the first season, which still paid for the effort.

Be honest with yourself about the pace. A past-guest list matters after a season or two, not in the first month, and the portals will still bring most first-time guests. Its value is that each guest has to be bought from a portal only once.

Count the guests you paid for twice

Open last season's register and mark every guest who stayed more than once, or came because a friend had. Each of those was commission you need not have paid. Your first task is to write the six-line note for the ten you remember best and message them yourself. Once the list grows past what one owner can type, the messages and the register become customer reactivation work; if you want that set up together, tell us what you need.