I hear some version of this every week:

“I know direct bookings are the play. I just don’t have time to do all that marketing.”

The operators who say this aren’t wrong about their situation.

They’re running the right math on the wrong comparison.

THE WRONG WAY

Most operators think they have two options:

Do the marketing myself, or let OTAs handle it.

If that’s the comparison, OTAs win almost every time.

You’re already managing turnovers at midnight and answering guest messages at 6am.

Adding content creation and Instagram strategy on top of that sounds like punishment.

So they rely heavily on OTAs.

The alternative looks like more work they don’t have time for.

The bill: 15 to 25% of every booking, on traffic that averages 24% lower ADR than direct.

That’s a subscription to someone else’s demand engine, billed as a percentage of your revenue.

THE PLAY

Spoon Mountain is three luxury safari tents in Wimberley, Texas. Hill country views, a spa tent, fire pits, 45 minutes from Austin.

When Ken and Yvette came to us, their glamping property was a side project.

The med spa was their main thing. Spoon Mountain had one person helping run it, a property manager type, and that was it. They were hosting a lot of influencers, but that well had run dry after a year or two (diminishing returns after 2022, once they’d already cycled through the major ones).

They needed support and they needed it badly.

Still, the product and the property were exceptional.

The challenge was pulling high-value guests consistently, without spending every evening on Instagram.

So we sent our videography team out.

Professional photography, drone footage over the hill country, virtual tours of each tent, lifestyle content built around the spa tent and fire pits. A visual library built to run for months.

We set a pricing strategy around their comp set and high-demand dates. We built a booking funnel from their best-performing reels straight to a reservation, and handled distribution.

Ken and Yvette managed the guest experience. Oasi ran the system.

That’s the shift: from executing the marketing yourself to owning the system that runs it. Someone else does the posting. You stay focused on the property.

In year one at Onera, I was on-site in an Airstream trailer during construction, managing influencers myself, running around with no team.

Today, Oasi runs 20 people deep. Onera has a staff of 15 across both properties. And I spend about 2 hours a week on oversight.

Getting from there to here takes time and the right people. The operators who figure that out stop asking whether they have time for marketing.

THE PROOF

At Spoon Mountain, after we built the system:

• 82,300 new followers in one year
• 23M+ total views, including one reel that crossed 5.5 million.
• Revenue jumped 68% year over year
• Direct bookings average ~94% (with 83% as their lowest month in the past year and a half)
• Summer revenue improved 51%.

Here’s the math on what that shift means per booking.

A 2-night stay at $550 per night, booked direct: $1,100.

OTA guests behave differently.

They book last-minute, or they pick the cheapest available dates. They’re price-shopping, not dream-planning. The inventory that fills through OTAs tends to be your slower calendar, at your lower nightly rates.

Then 15 to 25% commission comes off the top, often stacked with Genius pricing or last-minute discounts that push the host payout lower still.

So on a comparable booking, the net typically runs $390 to $470 less than what a direct guest would have paid.

Multiply that gap across a full season. (Most operators have never run that number.)

THE TAKEAWAY

Ben Wolff Founder, Oasi & Modern Hospitality Accelerator