[Sponsored content] Independent hotels can boost direct bookings by responding faster to guest enquiries. Opally founder Gustav Søgård shares how.
There’s a pattern I keep seeing as I talk to hotel owners across Europe. It goes like this: demand is strong, the hotel is busy, reviews are good, but somehow, margins keep getting thinner.
It’s not one thing. It’s everything at once.
The walls are closing in
Start with distribution. Booking.com commissions for independent hotels now sit anywhere between 15 per cent and 25 per cent, depending on your market and how well you negotiate, and as an independent, you’re not negotiating from a position of strength. Expedia is similar. These rates have crept up steadily over the past few years, and the “visibility booster” programmes that promise more eyeballs come with yet another cut.
Then there’s the new competition. Airbnb isn’t just a short-term rental platform anymore. Earlier this year, it was reported that Airbnb’s hotel strategy is now “much bigger” – the company is actively onboarding boutique and independent hotels in cities across Europe and the US, positioning itself as a full-service travel platform. They’re not coming for the big chains. They’re coming for you.
And speaking of big chains: Marriott just completed its $355 million acquisition of citizenM. IHG bought Ruby Hotels for $116 million. Hyatt absorbed The Standard. Hilton expanded Graduate Hotels. The lifestyle and boutique segment that independents pioneered is now being absorbed into loyalty ecosystems with hundreds of millions of members. These brands now have the distribution, the data, and the marketing budgets that most independent operators simply can’t match.
On top of all this, new tourist levies are rolling out across the UK and Edinburgh is introducing a five per cent nightly room charge from July. English cities are now being given the power to set their own. That’s one more line item on the bill, one more system to update, and one more reason for guests to hesitate.
The staffing gap that never closed
HOTREC’s latest report puts the European hospitality workforce gap at around 10 per cent – one in 10 positions unfilled, with the shortfall most visible in customer-facing roles – exactly where guest experience is won or lost.
The people who left during the pandemic largely haven’t come back. Wages are up but still not competitive with other sectors. And the demographic reality across Europe – ageing populations, tighter immigration policies – means the available labour pool is shrinking, not growing.
So you’ve got fewer people doing more work. The front desk agent is also the concierge, the complaint handler, the upseller, and the person expected to reply to 50 guest emails a day between check-ins and phone calls. Something has to give, and usually it’s response time.
The cost of a slow reply
Here’s what tends to get lost in big-picture industry discussions: most hotels are leaving direct bookings on the table simply because they can’t reply fast enough.
According to Netomi’s hospitality benchmark report, the average hotel email response time is over 12 hours. Only a third of hospitality brands manage to reply within the first hour. Meanwhile, the majority of guests expect a response within an hour. That’s a gap that costs real money.
A guest finds your hotel on an OTA, goes to your website to see if they can book direct, and has a question – about parking, about their dog, about whether you can do a late checkout. If nobody answers within the hour, they go back to Booking.com and you pay 20 per cent commission on a booking you could have captured for free.
It’s not that the team doesn’t care. They’re just dealing with a check-in queue, a phone that won’t stop ringing, and a housekeeping issue on the third floor. The email can wait. Except it can’t – because the guest won’t.
What we built, and why
This is the problem we set out to solve when we started Opally in Copenhagen. Not “how do we replace receptionists with AI” – that’s not what anyone needs. The question was simpler: what if your team could reply to every guest enquiry in under a minute, without dropping whatever they’re already doing?
Opally reads incoming messages – email, website chat, phone calls – pulls live data from your property management system (availability, rates, policies, guest history), and drafts a reply that sounds like your team wrote it. The draft appears right inside Gmail or Outlook. Your staff review it, adjust if needed, and send. No new system to learn. No workflow to change.
Hotels using Opally are cutting email handling time by around 70 per cent. But the number that matters more is the replies that now actually get sent – the ones that used to sit in the inbox for hours while staff were busy doing everything else.
We also handle the after-hours gap. Our chatbot answers website visitors around the clock with live availability and rates, in over 50 languages. The voice assistant picks up routine calls – directions, check-in times, breakfast hours – so the phone isn’t pulling your team away from guests who are standing right in front of them.
The independent advantage
Here’s the thing that gets lost in all the consolidation headlines: guests choose independent hotels for a reason. They want personality, not a loyalty programme. They want to feel like someone actually cares, not like they’ve been triaged by an algorithm.
That’s an advantage no chain can buy. But it only works if you have the time and capacity to deliver on it. The irony is that the things that make independent hotels special – the personal touch, the thoughtful communication, the feeling that somebody knows your name – are exactly the things that disappear when your team is buried in admin.
The question isn’t whether to use technology. It’s whether you’re using it to protect the thing that makes your hotel worth booking in the first place.
Gustav Søgård is the founder and CEO of Opally, an AI-powered guest communication platform for hotels, based in Copenhagen.
