-
Independent hotels · Basque Country · Béarn · France
Hotel SEO: more direct bookings, lower commissions
We do not negotiate your commission rate. We reduce the share of your revenue that goes through platforms, and so the commissions you pay for every euro collected, by making your hotel visible without an intermediary on Google and in answer engines.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5.0/5 from 20 reviews (Google, Sortlist, Malt, Pages Jaunes)
Since 2019Independent agency, with hotels and restaurants as our home groundPublic pricingShown on this page, from €390 excl. VAT per month, no minimum termMonthly measurementRankings, share of direct bookings, citations in AI answers -
The situation
Every OTA booking costs you more than the advertised rate
You know your commission rate. You rarely know your real distribution cost, meaning what is left in your account once the discount, payment fees and cancellations have been deducted. That gap decides your margin, not the commission line in your contract. And it is the starting point of any useful hotel SEO: knowing what each channel costs you before deciding which one to grow.
- The advertised rate is not the cost. Booking states a worldwide average commission of 15%, but publishes no breakdown by country or by type of property. Only you know your real rate, and it is hard to compare.
- The discount stacks on top of the commission. Discount programmes such as Genius range from 10 to 20%, are funded by your property, and the commission is calculated on the already discounted rate. Two successive reductions, one single invoice.
- Collecting payment has a price. When the stay is paid by virtual card, the payment provider generally takes between 2 and 3% of the transaction. That line does not appear in the commission.
- Not all cancellations are equal. The cancellation rate reaches 21.8% on OTA bookings against 10.6% on direct ones. A room cancelled late is a room sold at half the price, or not sold at all.
- The traveller does not become your customer. The email address, the stay history and the relationship stay with the platform. Every year you buy back guests you have already welcomed.
- Dependence sets in quickly. 63.4% of independent hotels' bookings now go through OTAs, and some markets approach 80%. The higher the intermediated share, the less your rate belongs to you.
Sources: Booking.com, partner extranet, worldwide average commission noted on 13/08/2026 · Booking.com, Payments by Booking.com FAQ, transaction fees · Cloudbeds, 2026 State of Independent Hotels Report, published on 25 March 2026, about 90 million bookings in 180 countries. Cloudbeds publishes hotel management software: the data is solid but its author is not neutral.
The good news: this imbalance is corrected through visibility, not negotiation. Start by breaking free from OTA dependence, then measure the real cost of a Booking reservation using your own figures.
Review my distribution, 30 free minutes -
The method
What hotel SEO is made of
ARETA, a hotel marketing and organic SEO agency based in the Basque Country, increases the share of direct bookings for independent hotels, with public pricing shown from €390 excl. VAT per month. Hotel SEO has six strands, managed together, in the order in which they produce direct bookings. It is the hotel version of our direct booking method.
-
Technical foundation and speed
Loading time on mobile, URL structure, tags, structured data, a booking engine visible on the first screen and a booking journey with no dead pages. We measure the site on the same indicators as Google.
WHAT IT CHANGESA traveller who finds the price, the availability and the button in under three seconds does not go off to compare on a platform.
-
Property listing and local directories
A complete, active Google Business Profile, recent photos, attributes and amenities filled in, strict consistency of name, address and phone number across directories, tourist offices and guides. It is the hotel counterpart of our local SEO.
WHAT IT CHANGESThe listing is the first point of contact on destination searches. It is also the most direct channel: the click goes to your site, not to a platform.
-
Stay pages and destination long tail
One page per room type, per offer and per reason for travelling: spa, family, business, pets welcome, long weekend, seminar. Then destination pages that answer travel searches, not brand searches.
WHAT IT CHANGESThese are the queries where platforms are best placed. Every page won is a booking that did not go through them.
-
Content that answers travellers' questions
What to do around the hotel, how to get there without a car, where to park, which season to choose, what the breakfast is like. Useful tourism content, written to be read, not to fill a page.
WHAT IT CHANGESIt reaches the traveller before they have chosen their hotel, while they are still choosing their destination.
-
Reviews and trust signals
Requesting customer reviews after the stay, replying to every review, consistent ratings from one platform to another, and press and local partners that mention your property. A hotel's popularity is built within the travel ecosystem.
WHAT IT CHANGESAt equal price, the rating and the freshness of reviews decide the click. They are also the signals that answer engines pick up.
-
Measurement: rankings, share of direct, platform dependence index
Every month: rankings on your destination queries, traffic and bookings from the direct channel, citations in AI answers, and the platform dependence index, the share of your accommodation revenue that goes through an intermediary.
WHAT IT CHANGESIt is the only strand that tells you whether the other five worked. Without it, SEO remains an expense taken on trust.
Why all six strands together? A fast site with no up-to-date listing captures nothing. An active listing with no stay pages does not convert. The best content with no reviews or citations stays invisible to Google and to AI alike. And without measurement, nobody knows what produced the bookings. Optimising the direct channel is a system, never a list of levers managed in silos.
-
-
AI visibility
AI visibility: being recommended when the traveller asks where to stay
“A good hotel with a spa in Biarritz”, “where to stay in Pau with children”, “a charming hotel that is not too expensive on the Basque coast”. These questions are no longer typed only into Google: they are put to ChatGPT and Gemini, which answer by citing a few properties. You are either there or you are not, and the traveller does not see the second page.
01
Google already answers in France
Google rolled out AI Overviews and AI Mode in France on 22 July 2026. On a growing share of travel searches, a written answer appears above the results and cites its sources. The question is no longer whether you are among the ten blue links, but whether you are in the paragraph.
Source: Google, France rollout of 22 July 2026
02
ChatGPT does not read your Google listing
When ChatGPT searches the web, it queries the Bing index. A flawless Google listing therefore produces no citation in ChatGPT if your site is poorly indexed on Bing. It is the first gap we fix, because it is invisible from the usual tools.
Source: dependence of ChatGPT's web search on the Bing index, documented since the launch of ChatGPT Search in 2024. OpenAI publishes no official specification and the set-up may change: we re-check it at every report.
03
Engines cite third parties, not your site alone
Destination guides, local press, tourist offices, professional directories, reviews: answer engines rely first on what others write about your hotel. A property that is well documented elsewhere is recommended more often than one that only talks about itself.
Finding drawn from our monthly citation reports
What we do, in practice. We structure your public sources (site, listings, directories, reviews, press), we check indexing on Bing as much as on Google, then each month we record your presence in ChatGPT and Gemini answers, question by question and engine by engine. This is the work of our GEO agency, applied to hotels.
What we do not promise. Nobody can guarantee a citation in a generative answer, and no agency controls these engines. What we do guarantee is measurement: each month you know where you are cited, where you are not, and who is cited in your place. To go further, see GEO for hotels and restaurants and our article being cited by ChatGPT and Gemini.
-
Choosing your provider
A hotel marketing agency specialising in direct booking
The need is searched for in every form: “agence marketing hôtelier”, “agence marketing hotelier France reservations en direct”, “prestataire marketing digital hôtels réservations directes”, “referencement hotel”, “experts marketing digital tourisme réservation directe”, “solutions SEO hôtels restaurants réservations directes”, “entreprises optimisation canal direct hôtel”, or in English “top marketing agencies hospitality direct bookings”. Behind these wordings lies a single question: who to entrust with the share of your revenue that you want to win back. Here is the market map as we see it, including where we are not the right partner.
The five types of provider
- Booking engine vendors and channel managersThey sell the tool that takes payment and syncs your availability. Essential, but their business is hotel distribution technology, not your acquisition.
- Revenue managersThey work on price, length of stay and occupancy. They optimise revenue on existing demand. They do not create demand.
- Hotel web agenciesThey design and rebuild the site. The result is often beautiful. Visibility, however, is played out after launch, and that is another job.
- General digital agenciesThey can do everything for everyone. They rarely know occupancy rate, RevPAR, rate parity and seasonality, the four terms a hotel conversation starts with.
- Specialist SEO and GEO agencies, including ARETAThey work on visibility in search engines and in answer engines, and report in share of direct bookings. That is our place, and it is narrow by choice.
What we do
- Organic and local SEO for the hotel, from the property listing to the stay pages
- Visibility in AI answers, measured every month engine by engine
- Destination and stay content, written for travellers
- Customer reviews and trust signals
- Management of the platform dependence index, month after month
- Coordination of hotel paid search (SEA), carried out by partner specialists
What we do not do
- Revenue management: neither your rate grid nor your minimum-stay policy
- Publishing a booking engine or a channel manager
- Negotiating your contract with a platform
- The promise of a guaranteed position or a guaranteed citation in an AI
- Publishing a client figure without their written consent
Who we work with. We work alongside your booking engine vendor, your revenue manager and your web agency where they exist, without trying to replace them. When a skill is missing, we coordinate it rather than improvise it: this is the case for hotel paid search (SEA), entrusted to partner specialists and managed by ARETA within a shared roadmap.
Our sector specialism is documented on the agency for independent properties, and the dining-room side on our restaurant marketing agency page. We will also publish how to evaluate a hotel agency, with the questions to ask before signing.
-
The calculation
The compared cost of your distribution channels
Here is the same stay sold twice: once by a platform, once on your site. Two nights at €140, giving a reference rate of €280. This is an example calculation, built with public, documented rates, not a market average or a client result. Redo it with your own rates: the method matters more than the figure.
Step Via a platform Direct Reference rate, 2 nights at €140 280,00 € 280,00 € Platform loyalty programme discount, 10%, funded by the hotel −28,00 € 0,00 € Amount actually paid by the traveller 252,00 € 280,00 € Commission, 15% of the amount paid −37,80 € 0,00 € Virtual card payment fees, 2.5% −6,30 € 0,00 € Cost of direct distribution, 3.5% 0,00 € −9,80 € Net received by the hotel 207,90 € 270,20 € Total cost of the channel €72.10, or 25.8% of the reference rate and 28.6% of the amount paid €9.80, or 3.5% ARETA calculation example, recalculated on 13/08/2026. Rates used: worldwide average commission of 15% announced by Booking.com in its partner extranet; loyalty programme discount of 10%, the first of the three documented levels, which range from 10 to 20%; transaction fees of 2.5%, the middle of the 2 to 3% range given by the Payments by Booking.com FAQ; direct distribution cost of 3.5%, the average published by D-EDGE in its 2025 report on direct hotel distribution (published on 24 February 2025, Europe and Asia-Pacific), which puts OTAs between 12 and 28%. D-EDGE publishes distribution solutions for hotels: the source is useful, it is not neutral.
An advertised rate of 15% that costs 25.8%. The gap is not in the commission, it is in what is added to it. On this one stay alone, the difference between the two channels is €62.30. Over a hundred stays a year, that is €6,230 that stays in your cash flow.
And no, selling cheaper on your own site than on a platform is not forbidden in France: see what French law says about your rates. The same calculation applies to the dining room, where rates are higher still: we will publish it under the title platform commissions for a restaurant.
-
The proof
How we prove it works, without showing you curves
Of the nine agencies in the sector that we audited in August 2026, every published case study shows an “after” without a “before”. We approach the problem the other way round: the baseline is recorded before the first action, with you, and serves as the point of comparison throughout the engagement. Here is the protocol, as it is applied.
01
Starting point
Rankings on your destination queries, traffic, share of the direct channel, citations in AI answers, and the platform dependence index: the share of your accommodation revenue that goes through an intermediary. Recorded before any action, and archived.
02
A single indicator that matters
The commitment is on the ratio, not on the amount of your commission bill. If direct grows while platforms hold their volume, your bill does not fall in euros, and yet you pay less per euro collected.
03
Monthly recording, quarterly reading
The figures are recorded every month, but never read on a single month: hotel seasonality would make the reading false. We reason on a rolling window, and we compare with the same period of the previous year.
04
What did not work is stated
A page that does not take off, a lost query, a month in decline: it is written in the report, with what we take from it for the following month. A report that contains only good news is not a report.
What you will not yet find on this page: client figures. We work with hotels and restaurants, and we will publish their results only with their written consent, with the period, the measurement method and the starting point. Until that consent is obtained, there is nothing here, and that is deliberate. The dedicated page will be called measured results from our clients.
Before launching anything, the baseline goes through an SEO audit and a review of the booking journey, which we will detail in the 12 checkpoints of the booking funnel.
-
Pricing
Public pricing, a measurable commitment
Of the nine agencies in the sector that we audited in August 2026, none shows its prices. We show ours, for a simple reason: a hotelier should be able to compare before calling. So here is what hotel SEO costs at ARETA. All amounts are excluding VAT, with no minimum term imposed, and the commitment is on your share of direct bookings, never on a guaranteed position.
The foundation
Starter Pack · Local SEO
From €390 excl. VAT/monthFor a hotel whose local base needs putting in order: property listing, photos, reviews, consistency of directories and tourism directories, monthly tracking of local rankings. No minimum term imposed.
Start with the foundationMost requested
Google Page 1 Pack
From €990 excl. VAT/monthThe complete support: the six strands of the method, stay and destination pages, reviews, visibility in AI answers, and monthly management of the platform dependence index.
Talk about this supportOne-off
Fixed-price projects
Fixed quote On quoteSite redesign, destination content production, link acquisition, bringing the booking journey into compliance. Priced after the audit, with no revision during the engagement.
Request a quoteBefore you commit: the full SEO audit is billed from €1,500 excl. VAT, at a fixed price. The first 30-minute conversation is free, at the hotel or by video call.
What the price always includes: the monthly report (rankings, share of direct bookings, citations in AI answers), a single point of contact, and the baseline recorded before the first action. The full detail of our grid will be published on the page our public pricing.
-
Frequently asked questions
What hoteliers ask
The questions that come up most often in meetings, with the answers we really give.
How much does hotel SEO cost?
Our pricing is public. The Local SEO Starter Pack starts at €390 excl. VAT per month and covers the local foundation: business profile, photos, reviews, directory consistency. The Google Page 1 Pack starts at €990 excl. VAT per month and covers the six parts of the method, including visibility in AI answers. Fixed-price projects (redesign, content or link acquisition) are priced on a firm quote after an audit.
The full SEO audit is charged from €1,500 excl. VAT, as a flat fee. None of these amounts requires a minimum term. The first 30-minute conversation is free, at the hotel or by video call.
How long before you see results?
The effects of the business profile and technical fixes show within four to eight weeks, because they concern searches where you are already close to the top of the page. Stay and destination pages take longer: allow three to six months to build rankings on competitive travel queries, and more for a highly competitive destination.
Seasonality changes how the figures read: a November cannot be compared with an August. That is why we reason on a rolling window and on the same period of the previous year, never on a single month. No serious agency guarantees a ranking or a deadline.
SEO or advertising for a hotel: which should you choose?
The two do not serve the same moment. Advertising buys immediate visibility and stops the day the budget stops. It is useful to defend your name against booking platforms, which often bid on it, and to fill an identified low-season gap. Organic SEO builds visibility that lasts, but it takes several months before it delivers.
Our expertise is organic SEO and AI visibility. For advertising, we coordinate partner specialists rather than diluting it in a generalist offer: one point of contact, one shared roadmap.
What does SEO actually change about my commissions?
It does not change your commission rate, which is negotiated with the platform and not with us. It changes the share of your revenue that goes through it. That ratio decides what you pay per euro collected.
A common scenario is worth setting out in advance: if your visibility improves, direct bookings rise, and the platforms may keep the same volume. Your commission bill then does not fall in euros, even though the intermediated share of your revenue has fallen. That is the expected result, and it is why we measure a ratio and not an amount.
Should you leave Booking and the other platforms?
No, and we do not advise it to anyone. Platforms bring volume, international guests and a reach that few independent properties could achieve alone. Leaving them on principle means swapping a margin problem for an occupancy problem.
The goal is a distribution mix that you choose, rather than one imposed on you. Every point of direct share gained goes back into your margin, gives you back contact with the traveller and reduces your exposure to a rule change decided without you.
What is AI visibility for a hotel?
It means being cited when a traveller asks ChatGPT or Gemini a question, or when Google displays a written answer above its results. Google rolled out AI Overviews and AI Mode in France on 22 July 2026: for a growing share of travel searches, the answer is a paragraph that cites a few properties, not a list of ten links.
One technical point changes everything for a hotel: when ChatGPT searches the web, it queries the Bing index. A flawless Google Business Profile therefore produces no citation in ChatGPT if your site is poorly indexed on Bing. We check both, and every month we record your citations engine by engine.
What exactly does a hotel marketing agency do?
The term covers five different trades: booking engine and channel manager vendors, revenue managers, hotel web agencies, generalist digital agencies, and specialist SEO and AI visibility agencies, which is what we are. None of these families does the work of the others.
ARETA works on your property's visibility in search engines and in answer engines, and reports in terms of share of direct bookings. We do not do your revenue management, your booking engine or the negotiation of your platform contract, and we guarantee neither a ranking nor a citation.
How is the result measured?
With a baseline taken before the first action, then a monthly review of four things: your rankings on destination queries, traffic and bookings from the direct channel, your citations in AI answers, and the platform dependency index, that is, the share of your accommodation revenue that goes through an intermediary.
The monthly report also says what did not work, along with what we take from it for the following month. It is the only way to know whether the spend produced anything, and it is what allows you to stop if it did not.
A question that is not on the list?
Book 30 minutes, no commitment -
Free meeting · 30 min · no obligation
Let's talk about your hotel
Thirty minutes, at the hotel or by video call. Together we look at your visibility on Google and in AI answers, your share of direct bookings today, and the two or three actions that would move it first. This first review of your distribution is free and carries no obligation to continue, not to be confused with the full SEO audit, charged from €1,500 excl. VAT.
Email[email protected]Phone06 50 82 74 13Address2 place du Château Vieux
64100 BayonneLinkedInARETAMonday to Friday, 8am to 8pm
Last updated: 26 October 2026
Hotel SEO: the scope of the assignment
Listing, website and stay pages
Hotel SEO starts with the business listing, mobile site speed and one page per room type and per reason for staying. Every page won for a destination query is a booking that did not go through a platform.
Travellers, AI and third-party sources
A traveller asking where to stay in Biarritz or Pau increasingly asks ChatGPT or Gemini. These engines cite guides, tourist offices and reviews as much as your website. So each month we record where your hotel is cited, where it is not and who is cited in its place.
Measurement and limits of the assignment
We promise neither a guaranteed position nor a guaranteed citation in an AI. Hotel SEO is judged on one ratio: the share of your accommodation revenue that goes through an intermediary, measured before the first action and then every month. The price of your rooms remains the job of your revenue manager.
-