Revitup.Direct Blog

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An interview with Dimosthenis Sdrolias, Head of Digital Marketing at RevitUp.Direct 

At RevitUp.Direct we say it often: for most hotels the problem isn’t how many people land on the website, but how many actually reach the booking. Ahead of the 6th Revenue Masterclass, we spoke with Dimosthenis Sdrolias about the gap between traffic and bookings — exactly where Digital Marketing and Revenue Management meet.

We often hear that hotels need “more traffic.” You say the problem is elsewhere. Where exactly? 

The traffic is there. What’s missing is conversion. A hotel can have thousands of visits a month and still convert only a handful — industry conversion rates typically sit in the low single digits. So the leak isn’t at the top, in “how many come in”; it’s further down, in “how many reach the booking button.” 

And watch out for a detail that distorts the numbers, especially at resorts: part of your traffic isn’t even people looking to book. They’re guests who have already booked —often the traditional way, through an agent— and land on the site simply to confirm their room or check the facilities. If you count them as potential bookings, your conversion rate looks worse than it is. 

And here’s the expensive mistake: the industry treats conversion as a marketing issue. It isn’t. It’s the point where marketing and revenue management meet. A flawless site with the wrong price won’t convert. The right price that no one communicates stays unknown. When those two run in separate silos, that’s exactly where the cost shows up. 

That’s why this year’s Masterclass is titled “Lookers to Bookers.” Pouring more money into traffic on top of a site that doesn’t convert is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. 

Many hoteliers say “people find me, but they book through Booking or Expedia.” Why does this happen, and what does it cost? 

It happens because, at the moment of decision, the traveller chooses the environment that makes them feel safe. They found you, visited your site, looked around — and went back to the OTA: a familiar process, reviews in one place, a clear cancellation policy, and the certainty they aren’t paying more. In most cases that certainty is justified, because your direct rate gives them no reason to stay. 

So you put in your brand and your time to create the demand, and a 15–25% commission goes to a third party for a booking that was already yours. And the worst part isn’t the commission: it’s that you lose the customer themselves. Their details, the relationship, the chance to bring them back next year without a middleman. 

And this is where marketing takes back control. If the first booking came through an OTA, fine — it happened. What mustn’t happen again is losing them as a contact too. You collect their details while they’re your guest, keep them close through your own channels —email, social, newsletter— and the next time they think of coming, they find you first and book direct. The second booking is where the middleman stops being necessary. 

The hotelier often hesitates to push the direct booking, afraid of losing visibility on the OTAs. But OTAs aren’t the enemy — they’re an excellent awareness channel. The point is not to leave the direct booking as the poor relation. And that, ultimately, is a pricing and distribution decision, not just a website matter. 

Let’s say the visitor reaches the site ready to book. What stops them? 

Boring things, but decisive ones. Speed: three seconds to load on mobile and you’ve lost them before they see a price. The booking engine: every extra click, every unnecessary field, every redirect to a page that looks foreign lowers conversion. Trust: without a clear cancellation policy, real photos and reviews, they go back to the OTA that gives them all of it at a glance. And, finally, a reason to book now — something that says “here, now, it’s worth it.” 

But there’s a fifth factor that isn’t even a website matter: price. If your direct rate is the same or worse than the OTA’s, no design can save it. Direct strategy is a pricing and distribution decision; marketing communicates it. When the revenue manager and the marketer look at the same numbers, this is solved in a week. When they don’t talk to each other, it’s never solved. 

Where do Google and Meta ads fit into all this — and how does a hotelier know if they’re working? 

They work only when there’s strategic planning behind them at the revenue management level. When you know which periods you want to build, which market, which room type and at what price, ads stop being generic exposure and become a tool: awareness activity where demand needs to be created, conversion activity where demand already exists and needs turning into a direct booking. Two pieces are particularly neglected: brand protection — when someone searches for your hotel by name and the first result is a paid OTA ad, you pay commission again for a customer who came looking for you, while defending your own name costs very little — and metasearch, where you catch the traveller at the exact moment they compare prices, with your direct rate right next to the OTAs. 

The “but” comes immediately: none of it matters if you don’t measure it. The data is scattered — PMS, booking engine, GA4, Google, Meta — and each tells its own story. So decisions get made on instinct: you cut a campaign that was bringing half your bookings, you feed one that was just collecting clicks. 

The goal isn’t more tools; it’s one view that connects the click to the actual booking and the actual revenue. And it’s an organisational issue before it’s a technical one: marketing and revenue reading the same report. 

We talked about measuring ads. More broadly now: how do you use data to make marketing decisions? 

Data isn’t there to confirm after the fact that something went well. It’s there to decide where you’ll put the next euro, and on whom. 

The most practical example is audiences. Who came in, checked dates and left; who has already stayed with you; who opened your emails. These tell you who’s worth talking to again: not wasting spend to bring back someone who already booked, building retargeting for the one who hesitated, speaking differently to last year’s guests. 

The second is syncing with revenue. Marketing shouldn’t push the periods that are already filling up, but the ones that need it — and which those are is something the revenue-side data tells you. That way you stop advertising a full August and put the budget into a May that has gaps. 

And the criterion is always the same: you measure bookings and revenue, not clicks and likes. 

AI is everywhere in the conversation. What’s real and what’s noise for a mid-sized hotel? 

There’s a lot of noise, because “AI” has become a magnet word. But the practical part is already here, and you don’t need to be a chain to use it: personalisation —a family and a couple on a city break have no reason to see the same site—, dynamic pricing and communication that adapts to demand without a spreadsheet, and service that answers, at eleven at night, the question that would otherwise block a booking. 

The two extremes I see are “it doesn’t concern me, I’m small” and “it’ll solve everything.” You start from a problem that already hurts you and put AI there. 

And a principle: AI strengthens the hotelier’s judgement, it doesn’t replace it. We don’t believe in black boxes that price on their own without the owner knowing why. The aim is for the hotelier to become master of their own revenue — always with clean data behind it. AI on top of messy data is just faster wrong decisions. 

On 16 October, at the 6th Revenue Masterclass, what do you want the hotelier to walk away having understood? 

Three things. First, that the next big gain isn’t hidden in more traffic or a bigger budget, but in converting better the people who already find you. 

Second, that this isn’t solved with one partner for the ads and another for the prices. It’s solved when revenue management and digital marketing are designed together, by people who know the hospitality industry, not just advertising. That’s the difference between a campaign that brings clicks and a strategy that brings bookings. 

Third, they should leave with things they can apply on Monday morning: open their site on a phone like a customer, check whether they defend their own name on Google, compare their direct rate with what the traveller sees on the OTAs, and ask their team which ad brought a booking last month — and see if there’s even an answer.

We break down the guest-retention side — keeping the customer through your own channels — in our guide to hotel email marketing.

💡 Want conversion and pricing designed together? At RevitUp.Direct we combine Revenue Management and Digital Marketing under a single strategy. 👉 Talk to our team

The 6th Revenue Masterclass will take place on Friday, October 16, 2026, at Candia Maris, in Crete. Reserve your spot with free registration here.