Most hospitality agency contracts start the same way. A project fee for the website build. A monthly retainer for SEO. A separate retainer for social. An ad-spend management percentage on top of the ad spend. A "strategy and account management" line that captures everything not already itemised. A renewal clause.
The contract is signed before any booking has been generated. The agency invoices the first month. The website goes into design. Twelve months pass. The property has paid a retainer every single month, often somewhere around $1,500, on top of the upfront build fee. The booking-engine line on the operator’s P&L looks roughly the same as it did before they signed. The agency response is "give it another year, SEO compounds."
We watched this happen too many times. So we changed the deal.
eTourism’s Boost Direct programme bills on a single line. A commission percentage on direct bookings the website generates. There is no upfront capital. No project fee. No design fee. No setup cost. No retainer. No ad-spend management surcharge. The commission percentage sits in the low single digits, structured so the property is materially better off compared with the OTA commission alternative on the same booking.
The structure is deliberately aligned. We only earn when the property’s direct-booking channel earns. Every channel the programme runs (paid media, organic, content, social, reputation) is built to drive direct bookings. The booking-engine click is the metric that maps to our revenue and yours. If we recommend something that does not drive direct bookings, we are recommending against our own earnings.
This is not a soft-edge marketing claim. The contract is structured to make it true.
Here is what the model changes about strategy.
We will not pitch a website refresh that we cannot earn back through commission. The website build sits inside the commission structure. The full cost of design, development, photography and copywriting is recovered from the booking-engine revenue the new site generates. If it does not generate, we do not recover. So the only websites we build are ones we are confident will earn.
We will not pitch marketing tactics that we cannot tie back to booking-engine clicks. A campaign that drives engagement but does not drive booking-engine clicks is a campaign we should not be running. So we do not run it.
We will not pitch volume work that adds activity to the report without adding revenue to the line. Three social posts a week instead of five, if five does not move the booking-engine number. Two blog posts a month instead of four, if four does not move the booking-engine number. The activity report stops being the report. The revenue line is the report.
This changes the conversation at every quarterly review. Instead of "the agency posted three times last week, the engagement rate is 2.4%, the CTR on the Google Ads campaign was 4.1%", the review is "the booking-engine line is up $X over baseline, here is the channel contribution, here is what is working and what is not". The activity is in support of the line. The line is not in support of the activity.
The model is hard for us. It is much harder than billing project fees. We carry the website-build risk. We carry the ramp-up cost while SEO compounds over the first 12 to 18 months. We carry the seasonal risk in months where bookings dip. We pre-fund every component of the programme and recover over the contract term.
For most properties, the model is a relief. The upfront capital question disappears. The "is this agency aligned with my outcome" question disappears. The seasonal-cashflow strain of paying retainers in shoulder seasons disappears. The agency is incentive-aligned to the direct-booking line, which is also the line the property cares about.
The model is not for every property. If your direct-booking volume is structurally low (extreme low-season properties, niche operators, low-margin properties where direct is a small percentage of total), the commission model may not be enough for us to underwrite a full programme. We will tell you that at the qualification call. We say no to more enquiries than we say yes to. The deal only works if we are confident in the result.
The downside, honestly: aligned incentives mean we have to be very selective about which properties we take on. The traditional agency model can be more flexible at the boundary because the agency gets paid either way. The Boost Direct model does not have that flexibility. We have to be confident before we sign, or we do not sign.
The upside: every quarterly review is on the same page. Both sides of the table are looking at the same line and asking the same question. Is the booking-engine revenue growing. If yes, the programme is working. If no, the programme has a problem we both need to fix.
The project-fee era of hospitality marketing is ending. The agencies that survive the next decade will be the ones that can underwrite their own results. The properties that pick those agencies will spend less, sleep better, and own the relationship with their guests instead of renting it from an OTA.
We only get paid when you do. That changes everything.