Two bookings arrive for the same Tuesday. One is $189 through an OTA at 18% commission — it nets $155. The other is $175 direct, and after roughly 3% in card fees it nets about $170. The booking report says the OTA guest paid more; the bank account says the "cheaper" direct guest is worth $15 more. Every channel decision your hotel makes should run on the second number, and most hotels never compute it.
One row per channel, one honest cost per row. Typical acquisition-cost ranges (they vary by market, contract and brand — plug in yours):
| Channel | Typical all-in cost | $189 gross nets… |
|---|---|---|
| Direct web | ~3–6% (cards, booking engine) | ~$178–183 |
| Voice / walk-in | ~3–8% (cards, labor) | ~$174–183 |
| GDS / travel agent | ~10–18% (commission + fees) | ~$155–170 |
| OTA, standard | ~15–25% commission | ~$142–161 |
| OTA package / opaque | discounted rate + margin, often 30%+ below BAR net | ~$120–135 |
| Wholesale / bedbank | contracted net rates, often 20–30% below BAR | ~$132–151 |
| Group / negotiated | rate discount ± commission; add value beyond rooms | varies — see the displacement math |
Count everything, not just commission: loyalty-program charges on redemption and points-earning stays, channel-manager and booking-engine fees (they belong to direct's cost, not overhead), credit-card processing, and the quiet cost of parity pressure — the discounts you give everyone because one channel demanded them. The result is a one-page table that converts any booking report into money.
Mix analysis is two columns: each channel's share of room nights and its net ADR. The pattern to respect: channel value is seasonal. OTA share climbing in your need periods is the system working — that's demand you wouldn't otherwise get, and $155 net beats an empty room's $0 every time. The same OTA share climbing into your compression dates is leakage: those guests would have booked anyway, many of them direct, and every one costs you the commission for nothing. Judge each channel by when it books you, not just how much.
Three recurring calls the net table settles: closing OTA promos into compression — deep-discount member deals and packages should close weeks before a citywide, while they're still cheap to close (the same logic as the rate ladder: the cheap rooms sell first exactly when you least need them to); wholesale — a $132-net contract earns its keep only if it books need periods you genuinely can't fill and carries allotment caps + blackout dates for everything else; and package/opaque — need-period fillers by design; on shoulder or better dates they cannibalize at your worst net. None of these are "OTA bad, direct good" — they're all just the table applied to a date.
A 100-room hotel at 75% occupancy sells ~27,375 room nights a year. Shift 10 percentage points of that mix — ~2,738 room nights — from OTA (18% commission, nets $155 on a $189 rate) to direct (~$5.70 cards + ~$3 booking-engine fee, nets ~$180), same gross rate:
~$25 more per room night × 2,738 room nights ≈ $69,000 a year in net revenue — with identical occupancy and identical published rates. That's the size of the prize hiding in a mix report, and why "our ADR is up" and "we made more money" are different sentences. (The same logic explains why rate-cut math should always run on net numbers.)
The Rate Strategy Pack includes the channel net-ADR worksheet and the promo-ROI model that prices exactly these decisions; the channel-review cadence and parity checklist are SOPs in the RM Playbook; and the free calculators handle the quick per-booking math. Net ADR also belongs in your segment forecast — a forecast built on gross ADR inherits every distortion described above.