A resort group filling rooms through aggregators at 18–22% commission, with no direct acquisition channel and no way to attribute a booking to a campaign.
Rooms were filling, so it did not look like a marketing problem. But every booking arrived through an aggregator taking close to a fifth of the room rate, and the group had no relationship with the guest, no ability to remarket, and no channel it controlled.
Previous agency work had produced enquiries at a low cost per lead. Nobody could say how many became stays.
Before any media change: GA4 rebuilt, server-side events for enquiry and booking, every lead written into the CRM with campaign, ad set and creative attached. Until a booking could be traced to an ad, no optimisation was trustworthy.
Lead forms rebuilt around date flexibility, party size and budget. Cost per lead rose in the first weeks — deliberately — while cost per confirmed booking fell.
Instead of rate cuts, packages built around what the property could deliver at no marginal cost: late checkout, experiences, upgrades. Direct became more attractive than the aggregator without eroding rate.
Follow-up inside ten minutes, with automated sequencing behind it. In hospitality, response latency is the largest controllable factor in close rate.
Monsoon, Onam and the long-weekend calendar built into budget pacing from month one rather than discovered as anomalies mid-quarter.
| Measure | Before | After 6 months | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct booking revenue | Not tracked | ₹5.24 Cr | New channel |
| Verified ROAS | Not measurable | 29.0x | — |
| Leads generated | — | 43,910 | — |
| Cost per lead | ₹63 | ₹40 | −36% |
| Enquiry → booking rate | 4.1% | 9.8% | +139% |
| Aggregator share of bookings | ~94% | 61% | −33 pts |
Figures are the client's own booking records reconciled against media spend. Platform-reported conversions were higher; we do not report those.
Every point moved from aggregator to direct returns commission to the operator. That, not the ROAS figure, is the outcome the owners cared about.
Cost per lead is a vanity metric in hospitality. Cheap enquiries from people who cannot travel on your available dates cost more to process than they return.
Response time outperforms creative. The largest single lift came from operations, not media — contact inside ten minutes rather than the next morning.
Attribution is the deliverable. The group's ability to see which campaign produced which booking outlasts any campaign we ran.
Send us your current numbers and we'll tell you where the system leaks — the target CAC you should be working to, and whether your economics support scaling at all. You keep the findings either way.