How direct bookings work

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Why	See the whole chain of a direct booking — from the guest’s click on your website to the booking in the calendar grid — and understand where commissions appear and where they don’t.
Who	Hotel owners and administrators who sell rooms on their own website — or are deciding whether to start.
What you’ll get	The full picture: the guest’s path through the module, the booking’s source in the calendar grid, a price with no engine fees, the guest form fields, and the honest limits — up to 4 rooms per booking, no “one-time links”.
Limitations	The module does not promise the guest the best price “anywhere” and takes no commission on the booking: with online payment, its share goes to card acquiring. The set of guest form fields is fixed.

A direct booking is one the guest makes on the hotel’s own website: they pick dates and a room, leave their details, and get a confirmation. To the hotel it looks like any booking in the calendar grid — except there is no channel in between the guest and you. This article covers the guest’s path through the booking module (Booking Engine), the booking’s place in the PMS, the price, and the limits the module honestly works within.

How a direct booking differs from a channel one

A channel booking arrives through an intermediary: the guest found the hotel on a channel, the channel led them to the booking — and the hotel pays that channel a commission for the guest it brought in. A direct booking starts on your website: the guest came on their own — from a search, a newsletter, or a recommendation. There is no “channel” link in the chain, and so no channel commission.

The price the guest pays comes from your rate plans: the same price set in the PMS, with no engine markup on top. The only commission that can appear along the way is for card processing at online payment — and it is charged by the acquiring provider, not by the module (more on that below).

And the contact stays with you: the guest leaves their email and phone number in a form on your website.

The guest’s path: from dates to a booking

The guest starts on your website: a search widget on the front page or the full module on a separate one — how to embed them is covered in Booking Engine. From there the path is always the same:

Dates and party. The guest picks arrival and departure dates and the size of the party.
Room. The module shows the available room types with prices from your rate plans.
Services. Extra services can be added to the booking — which services sell and under which rules is covered in a separate article.
Guest details. A form with the guest’s name and contacts; its contents are in the section below.
“Book now”. The button under the form completes the booking; if the rate calls for online payment, a payment step opens before the confirmation.

Next to the steps the guest sees the order summary: dates, number of nights, the price broken down by day, a payment terms block (for example, “Pay at property”), and the total. An item can be removed from the order before it is completed.

After the button, the guest sees a confirmation with the booking number. With a pay-at-the-property rate there is no payment step at all — the confirmation comes right after “Book now”. No empty steps linger on the path: if there is nothing to sell (no services, no online payment), the module skips the extra step on its own.

Outcome: the guest reaches the confirmation without leaving the hotel website, and by that moment the booking already exists.

Where the booking lands

In the PMS, a website booking appears on its own — as a bar on the calendar grid, next to channel bookings. Nothing needs to be retyped from letters or spreadsheets: by the time the front desk opens the grid, the booking is already there.

The booking’s source is visible on the booking itself: in the calendar grid legend (“Bar symbols”) it is listed as “Hotel website” — among sources such as “Direct (front desk)”, “Phone”, “Corporate booking”, “OTA channel”, and others.

The card is the same as for any other booking: the same tabs — “Rooms and guests”, “Payments”, “Rate”, “History”, and the rest — and the same actions: check-in, payment, cancellation. What is inside the card is covered in Inside the booking card.

Outcome: a direct booking is no different from one entered by hand — the same grid, the same card, the same way of working.

What a direct booking costs

There is no engine commission on the booking. The module adds no fees of its own to the price: the guest pays the sum built from your rates and services. The module itself is paid for by subscription — no per-booking commissions on top of it.

Online payment is a separate matter. Card payments go through the payment gateway (Stripe), and the card processing fee belongs to acquiring, not to the engine: the fee’s size — and whether the guest or the hotel pays it — is set by the gateway’s terms. Bookings without online payment never touch this cost.

And about “the best price”. The module sells at your rates and does not compare them with channel prices, so a best-price promise is only honest within your own website — “here the price comes from the hotel’s rates” — rather than “you won’t find it cheaper anywhere”.

Which prices the guest sees and how they work — in Rate plans: how they work.

The fields the guest fills in

The guest form is the step right before “Book now”; its heading is “Guest Information”. There are five fields:

First name, Last name, and Email — required by default, marked with an asterisk.
Patronymic — optional, and only in the Russian form: interfaces in other languages do not show this field.
Phone — optional.

There are no consent checkboxes in the form — neither for terms nor for newsletters. No address block either: five fields and the “Book now” button.

Which fields are required is a setting: Online booking → Settings, the “Guest fields” tab, the “Required fields for bookings” block. The fields ticked there get the asterisk and a check when the booking is created. The set of fields itself is fixed: the form stops at these five, and custom fields cannot be added.

Outcome: the guest leaves a minimum of data, and which of it is required is your call in the module settings.

Honest limits

Up to 4 rooms per booking. A multi-room booking is possible, but not unbounded: 4 rooms at most. A party that needs more is a job for the front desk — there the booking is entered manually in the PMS.
The module link is ordinary and permanent. “One-time links” do not exist: the same code or address works for every guest and does not expire after a booking. A personal link is a Guest Portal tool: it is issued for a specific booking and has nothing to do with the module.

These limits are part of how the module is built. Scenarios that go beyond them — large parties and personal links — live in the PMS and the Guest Portal, not in the module.