A gap worth more than any campaign

Direct web revenue was down year on year and the reason was contested — volume, rate, length of stay and channel mix were each plausible, and each pointed at a different remedy.

We built a like-for-like comparison across matched periods, comparing like day against like day rather than date against date, and decomposed the decline into its parts, down to individual properties rather than describing it in aggregate.

The finding that mattered wasn't in the media plan. Mobile converts at less than half the rate of desktop — on a property where most of the audience arrives on a phone. No amount of additional spend fixes that, and every additional dollar of spend makes it more expensive.

The engagement now runs weekly: booking and search performance, daily OTA monitoring, geographic segmentation, and contact-centre reporting covering calls, abandonment, speed to answer, handle time and conversion to sale.

The client challenged how we had defined average rate — room versus package versus ancillary — and they were right to. Reconciling blended web metrics against property-level systems is the work that follows a first diagnostic, and it became the next phase of the engagement.