Palm Grove Resorts had four beautiful properties along the ECR corridor and healthy occupancy — but 88% of every room was booked through OTAs paying an 18% commission. Here's how we built a direct-booking channel that cut cost-per-booking 58% in four months.
Palm Grove Resorts
Boutique resort chain, 4 properties along the ECR–Mahabalipuram corridor
12% direct bookings
88% of rooms booked through OTAs at 18% commission
4 months
Fixed-scope performance marketing sprint
Performance Marketing
Meta + Google campaigns, direct-booking funnel, guest retargeting
Palm Grove Resorts had built four genuinely beautiful boutique properties along the ECR–Mahabalipuram corridor, and occupancy sat at a healthy 70% average. But founder Aravind Krishnan had a margin problem hiding behind that healthy number: 88% of every room booked came through Booking.com, MakeMyTrip and Agoda, each taking an 18% cut off the top. The resort's own website was a brochure — pretty photography, no real booking incentive, no retargeting of guests who'd already stayed once, and nothing to capture a guest for a second, commission-free visit. As the group prepared to open a fifth property, the math became impossible to ignore: they were handing away nearly a fifth of every rupee of room revenue to platforms that also owned the guest relationship.
Measured the true property-by-property cost of OTA dependence and audited the existing website's booking flow, finding almost no path to a direct reservation.
Built booking-intent landing pages per property with rate-parity-aware "book direct" offers that added value without undercutting OTA pricing.
Launched Google Search campaigns on booking-intent terms ("resorts in ECR for family") and Meta remarketing built from the group's CRM.
Email and WhatsApp journeys targeted past OTA guests specifically, nudging their second stay toward the direct channel.
Designed a perks-based incentive layer — late checkout, welcome hamper, spa credit — instead of price cuts, staying inside OTA rate-parity clauses.
Built a monthly dashboard showing ownership real margin recovered per property, not just traffic or click volume.
Perks beat price. Because rate-parity clauses ruled out discounting on the direct channel, the perks-based incentive layer became the single biggest lever — guests chose direct for the welcome hamper and late checkout, not a lower price.
Direct-booking campaigns brought acquisition cost per room-night down sharply, and it held past the initial campaign push.
Direct share more than tripled across all four properties within the four-month engagement.
Real margin recovered in four months — tracked property by property, not estimated.
"I used to think of OTAs as the cost of doing business. Watching our direct-booking share triple while cost-per-booking fell by more than half changed that completely — we finally own the guest relationship for our best customers."
Direct-booking share, cost-per-booking and commission-saved figures come from the property management system and ad-platform data, compared against the pre-engagement baseline across all four properties. Timeframe and starting baseline stated above, as with every case study we publish.
We'll check how your property ranks on Maps and search for booking-intent terms, score your review health against nearby competitors, and show you exactly how much OTA commission a direct-booking channel could save you. Free, and genuinely useful even if we never work together.
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