Fill more rooms with direct bookings.

Move the marginal booking, not the whole book. The platform stays as reach, and the work is to win the guest who was going to book anyway: matching what they already saw, removing the steps between the rate and the confirmation, and giving them a reason to finish on your own site. Google free booking links help here, because there is no cost for a click on one and they are ranked partly on the historical accuracy of the prices you send, measured against the page a guest lands on. That is the same discipline the Dubai disclosure rule already asks of you, which is why the compliance work and the distribution work are one job rather than two. Cutting platform distribution overnight is a different decision and usually a costly one.

The Tourism Dirham Fee has to be described and its amount stated in the room price lists, and Administrative Resolution No. 2 of 2020 says that expressly includes the prices announced through websites and electronic applications. The same resolution requires the wording to make clear it is a fee and not a tax, and the fee is collected from the guest who occupies the room regardless of the entity that made the reservation. Separately, Executive Council Resolution No. 48 of 2014 makes a service charge above a tenth of the bill a violation, and requires the tariff and price lists to be displayed inside the property in Arabic and English. In practice that makes the published rate a marketing artefact with a compliance obligation attached, which is why we read every surface showing a price before a campaign is planned.

Yes. In Abu Dhabi the guest review score is an input to the hotel classification itself. The classification manual DCT Abu Dhabi publishes defines a Guest Experience Index as a weighted average of guest reviews drawn from over 100 online review platforms, with platforms that do not verify reviews weighted lower, monitored monthly once a classification has been awarded. If the index sits below the minimum for three months in a row, DCT deploys a mystery shopper to validate the feedback, and an unresolved issue can see the classification lowered. That makes a review programme a licensing matter in Abu Dhabi and a commercial one everywhere else. The manual DCT publishes today carries a 2018 document date and an update has been announced, so we check the version before a threshold goes into a plan.

No. Misrepresentation by a hotel establishment of its activities, information or classification in advertisements is a named violation in Executive Council Resolution No. 48 of 2014, so the rating you publish is the one you currently hold. Classification is not optional either: under Decree No. 17 of 2013 no hotel establishment may operate in the emirate unless it is licensed and classified, and because that decree reaches properties in special development zones and free zones including the Dubai International Financial Centre, a free zone address changes nothing here. If an upgrade is in progress, the campaign is planned to launch behind the award rather than in front of it. The awarded rating goes in the creative and the expected one stays out of it.

More than the commission, and the difference is not one number. A commissioned booking costs a percentage set in the accommodation agreement you signed, which varies by property and by market and is not published by the platforms, so the honest answer is that your rate is in your own contract. The part that appears on no invoice is the guest record: contact details, stay history and preferences that stay with the platform, so the next stay is acquired again at the same cost. A direct booking carries the cost of the demand you bought and nothing per stay after it, and it leaves you a guest you can reach. We size it from your own channel split rather than from a benchmark.

Both, and the honest position is that this page is written for hotels. The search demand in this vertical is hotel demand: the queries carrying a business buyer are hotel and hospitality marketing terms, while almost everything on the travel side is a consumer looking for a visa or a travel agent. A licensed inbound operator or DMC sits inside the same problem, because the product is assembled from other people's inventory, the booking is intermediated the same way, and an advertisement a licensed operator publishes is a promise it is held to. If that is the business, the work is recognisable: the direct path, the published terms, and a record of the traveller you are allowed to keep.

It is scoped rather than priced from a menu, and three things move the figure. The first is whether a guest can already complete a booking on your own site, because building that path is a different engagement from improving one. The second is how many surfaces publish a rate: one property with a website and an app is a short piece of work, a group of six with legacy microsites is not. The third is the state of the reviews, which in Abu Dhabi is a classification question and in Dubai is a demand one. We scope after reading the booking page, the rate surfaces and last month's channel split.