How much commission you are leaving at the portal. Work it out from your own statements

Where to find your own rate

In the portal's dashboard, in the payments or invoices section. Look for a document from the past month or season. You will find two amounts there: the total the guests paid, and the amount the portal deducted. The second divided by the first, multiplied by a hundred, is your real rate.

Calculate it over the whole season, not over one month. The rate can look different in different months of the season, so a single month can lie in either direction. Booking states in section 1D of its How we work page that properties in the Preferred Partner Programme pay a higher commission. If you are in such a programme, your rate is not the one from the basic price list.

Now the most important part. You will not get this amount back in full

The portal does not take this money for nothing. It takes it for showing your property to someone who had never heard of it, and for convincing them that paying a stranger over the internet is safe.

The guest who typed "cottage in the mountains for a weekend" into a search engine is not yours to win back. They do not know your name and have no way of finding your website.

Two groups can be won over. The first are guests who have already stayed with you. They come back by name, not by date and price. The second are word-of-mouth guests, who got your property's name from someone and are searching for it directly. In both cases the person types the name into a search engine and lands either on your website or back on the portal listing.

Work out the amount you can realistically get back

1. Take the season's total commission, the one calculated above.
2. Go through the reservations and count those that came from returning guests. You will recognise them by name or from memory.
3. Add the word-of-mouth reservations, if you know about them from conversations at check-in. This number is usually bigger than you think, because not everyone says how they know you.
4. That part of the commission is yours to recover. The rest is an honest fee for reaching people you would not have reached on your own.

What the guest needs in order to book with you

Exactly what the portal gives them, and not one thing less. That is the whole secret, and it is why simply cutting the price by the commission is usually not enough.

The portal gives them all the information on one screen, a clear price for their specific dates, cancellation rules and the certainty that someone will answer if something goes wrong. If your website shows no price, does not say by when a booking can be cancelled, and has a form you reply to after two days, the guest will go back to the portal, even if staying with you would have been cheaper.

The worst case is the one where your website shows a different price from the portal's. Then the guest does not pick the cheaper option. They decide something here is off, and book where they feel safer, which means with the middleman.

The short answer

The commission cannot be taken to zero, and it is not worth promising yourself that it can. What can be recovered is the part you pay for guests who already know your name. There is one condition: when such a guest types your name into a search engine, they must find a place that answers everything and says exactly the same as the portal listing.