How to Accurately Calculate Your Hotel’s Direct Conversion Rate
by francesco d'acunto
Conversion rate is one of the most quoted metrics in digital analytics, yet one of the most misunderstood. In the hotel industry, “conversion” is often simplified as any booking made through the official website.
However, this overlooks the complexity of the booking journey and can lead to an inaccurate view of a hotel’s real direct performance.
In this article, we explore how to correctly calculate your direct conversion rate, distinguishing between interest, intent, and actual booking actions.
What direct conversion really means
A direct conversion is not simply a booking made through the booking engine. It represents the final step of a process in which a user visits the hotel website, explores rooms or offers, enters the booking engine, and completes the transaction.
That’s why conversion should always be analysed together with two other metrics:
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): how many visitors access the booking engine compared to total website traffic.
- Booking Completion Rate: how many users complete a booking after starting the process.
Only by combining these data points can we understand how efficient the direct channel truly is.
The correct formula
Many hotels still calculate conversion as bookings received divided by total website visits x 100. While this gives a rough idea, it’s not technically accurate. A more reliable method focuses only on qualified sessions, meaning visits where users actually entered the booking engine.
Direct conversion rate equals direct bookings divided by sessions with booking engine access x 100.
Example: if a website registers 10.000 total sessions, 2.000 users access the booking engine, and 120 complete the booking, the real conversion rate is 6%. Independent hotels in Italy typically see rates between 1,5% and 3%, depending on location, seasonality, and pricing.
The variables that distort the data
Many hotels report conversion anomalies simply because their tracking is incomplete or inconsistent. Common sources of distortion include non-traveller traffic such as suppliers or internal staff, duplicated sessions caused by tests or refreshes, cross-device sessions that start on mobile and finish on desktop, and booking engines hosted on a separate domain without proper tracking in Google Analytics 4.
In this regard, we recall a previous article published on our blog about identifying the most relevant data in Google Analytics — a useful guide to understanding which metrics truly deserve attention when evaluating digital performance.
Read the full article at this link
To avoid errors, it’s essential to configure the begin_checkout and purchase events in Google Analytics 4 or Tag Manager, ensuring consistent cross-domain tracking between the website and the booking engine.
Why conversion rate is strategically important
A high direct conversion rate is more than a sign of website efficiency; it reflects the overall health of your direct channel. At the same traffic level, even a 1% increase in conversion can generate 15-20% additional annual revenue, without intermediary costs.
That’s why it should always be part of the revenue dashboard, together with direct channel ADR, ROI from metasearch and brand-protection campaigns, and the direct versus OTA revenue ratio.
How to improve your direct conversion rate
Key actions to strengthen your direct channel performance include simplifying the booking flow by reducing steps and improving clarity, continuosly monitor rate alignment with OTAs, adding trust signals such as best rate guarantee, guest reviews and clear cancellation terms, optimising mobile experience since over 60% of users start their journey on smartphones, and continuously analysing booking funnels to identify where users drop off.
Conclusion
Your hotel’s direct conversion rate is not just a number. It reflects how well your digital experience, pricing strategy, and brand trust align. Measuring it accurately allows you to act on real data, turning existing traffic into measurable and sustainable revenue.
Every hotel website attracts visitors, but only a few successfully turn them into bookings. With INSIDER’s free audit, we analyse your user journey, booking-engine structure, and real conversion data to identify improvement opportunities. You’ll receive a concise report with observations, benchmarks, and actionable insights to increase your hotel’s direct booking rate.
Book your free analysis at insiderquality.com
