How Harborview Hospitality Group Cut OTA Commission Costs with a Direct Booking Platform

Harborview Hospitality Group runs 22 boutique hotels across the UK and Ireland, each with its own character but sharing one uncomfortable business reality: roughly 70% of reservations arrived through third-party online travel agencies charging 15-20% commission on every booking. That's a substantial and growing tax on revenue for a hotel group whose guests, once they'd stayed once, often genuinely preferred booking directly — they just weren't given a good enough reason or interface to do so.

Each property still ran its own booking widget, and most of them were badly outdated relics from a decade of incremental patches rather than any real redesign. Guest profiles didn't carry over between properties either, so a guest who'd stayed at the Bath property twice and was now booking the London property for the first time was treated, digitally, as a total stranger — no recognition, no personalization, nothing that might have nudged them toward loyalty.

Behind the scenes, rate parity across OTAs and the direct site was checked and adjusted by hand, which meant occasional embarrassing mismatches where the OTA listing undercut Harborview's own direct rate. And there was no loyalty or rewards program of any kind — nothing systematically encouraging the guests most likely to book direct to actually do so.

We built a single, modern direct-booking engine to replace the patchwork of outdated per-property widgets, integrated with a channel manager so availability and rates sync automatically across every OTA Harborview lists on, plus the direct site. That sync is what made automated rate parity possible — the platform now compares direct and OTA rates continuously and flags mismatches before a guest ever sees one.

The bigger structural change was a unified guest profile that follows a traveler across all 22 properties. A guest who's stayed at the Bath property now gets recognized the moment they start booking the London property — same loyalty tier, same preferences on file, same booking history — which is the foundation the new loyalty and rewards program builds on.

We piloted the new booking engine and guest CRM on four flagship properties first, chosen specifically to represent Harborview's range from city-center business hotels to countryside retreats, since guest behavior differs meaningfully between them. That pilot shaped several UX decisions — countryside-property guests, for instance, booked further in advance and cared more about photos of the grounds than city-property guests did, which changed how we prioritized content on each property's booking page.

Group-wide rollout followed once the pilot metrics looked solid, alongside the loyalty program launch — timed together deliberately, since a loyalty program with no meaningfully improved booking experience behind it tends to underwhelm.