Hospitality · Laguna Beach · 10 months
Winning bookings back from the OTAs, one search at a time
A boutique hotel in Laguna Beach. The property was gorgeous and nearly fully booked most of the year — the problem was who got paid for those bookings. Online travel agencies owned the branded search results and took a commission on rooms guests would happily have booked direct, if they could have found the site.
The situation
Paying commission on their own name
Search the property's own name and the first several results were online travel agencies — not the hotel's site. Guests who already knew the brand and intended to book direct were getting routed through a booking.com or Expedia listing instead, and the hotel paid commission on every one of those rooms. The hotel's own website was slow, built for a desktop era, and did nothing to make the case for booking direct — no rate-match promise, no direct-booking perks, and content that described the rooms but said nothing about the town.
What we did
Built a case for booking direct, then made it easy
First, we rebuilt the site itself around a direct-booking path: clearer room pages, a faster booking flow, and a visible best-rate guarantee so guests had an actual reason to skip the OTA. We fixed the technical basics that had been quietly working against them — slow image loading, missing Hotel schema, and a mobile experience that made booking on a phone genuinely frustrating.
Second, we went after branded search directly. That meant tightening on-page SEO on every page that could plausibly rank for the hotel's own name, building out proper LocalBusiness and Hotel structured data, and making sure Google understood the hotel's own site as the authoritative source about itself, not just one listing among many.
Third, we built neighborhood content the OTAs never bother with — guides to the coves, restaurants, and galleries within walking distance, written by people who actually know the town. That content earns its own search traffic and, more importantly, gives guests a reason to trust the hotel's judgment about the destination, not just the room.
How it played out
Direct revenue crept up as OTA share crept down
This kind of shift happens booking cycle by booking cycle, not overnight — guests plan beach trips months out. Over 10 months, direct bookings grew +156% while OTA commission spend fell 38% and organic revenue overall was up +94%. The neighborhood guides quietly became some of the highest-converting pages on the site, which was the part the team found most satisfying.
Services used
Anonymized composite drawn from typical engagements; numbers are illustrative.
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