For hotels, villas, rooms and tour operators
Every direct booking is a commission you keep
We build booking engines, channel manager integrations and the operational tools behind them - for Greek hotels, villa portfolios and tour operators who have worked out that the OTAs are now their largest single cost line.
- €180 night, 15% commission: €27 to the OTA
- same night, visibility programme: €45, at 25%
- 100 nights moved to direct: €4,500 kept
- card fees on those nights: €252 back out, at 1.4%
- a €6,000 booking engine: pays back in the second season
- the guest who already knew your name: still 25%
The calculator below is doing real arithmetic on numbers you enter. Nothing is sent anywhere, and it will tell you when a build is not worth it.
In plain language
What is a booking engine, and how is it different from a channel manager?
A booking engine is the part of your own website where a guest picks dates and pays you directly - no commission, no intermediary, and the guest's details are yours. A channel manager is the piece that keeps your availability and rates in sync across Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and the rest, so you cannot sell the same room twice. A PMS (property management system) is the back office behind both: the arrivals list, the housekeeping board, the folio. Most properties need all three, and the expensive mistake is buying one product that does one of them well and the other two badly. They talk to each other through APIs, which means you can keep the parts that work and replace the parts that do not.
Words that get used interchangeably and should not be
- OTA
- Online travel agency - Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb. They bring you demand you would not otherwise reach and charge 15-18% for it, which becomes 25-30% once you opt into the visibility programmes. They are worth using. They are not worth using for the guest who already knew your name.
- Rate parity
- The clause in your OTA contract about not undercutting them on your own site. What it does not cover is what you can add: a free transfer, a late checkout, breakfast, a better room. That is where direct booking is actually won, and it is a software problem.
- Metasearch
- Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, Kayak - they compare prices rather than taking the booking, and the price they compare can be yours. This is the one channel that hands a guest straight to your own engine, which is why it is worth having an engine worth handing them to. Routinely confused with an OTA; the difference is who keeps the transaction.
- Direct booking
- A reservation made on your own site. The margin is the whole point, but so is the data - a direct guest can be emailed next season without asking a platform for permission.
- AMA (ΑΜΑ)
- The property registration number from ΑΑΔΕ that must appear on every short-term rental listing. Since 20 May 2026, EU Regulation 2024/1028 has made a registration number mandatory across the EU and obliges platforms to verify it and delist what fails.
What the commission actually costs, and when a build pays for itself
Put your own numbers in. It computes annual room revenue, what the OTAs take from it, and what shifting some of that to direct is worth after card fees - then divides a build cost into it to give you a payback period in months. Everything but one input comes off your books; the share you could win direct is a guess, so the chart sweeps it and tells you the smallest guess that still pays back inside two seasons. If the payback is bad it will say so, which is the opposite of what a vendor calculator does.
- Start from a property like yours, or set your own rooms and rate.
- Drag the share you would win direct and watch the payback move.
- On the availability rules tab, try a stay an off-the-shelf engine would accept.
0/3
Start from
- Room nights sold
- 3,125
- Annual room revenue
- €296,856
- Paid to OTAs15.4% of all room revenue
- €45,716
- Revenue moved to direct
- €41,560
- Commission not paid
- €9,143
- Less card processing
- − €623
At 20% you are already past the crossing. The assumption has room in it, which is the comfortable place to be making this decision from.
Net gain per year
€8,520
Build pays for itself in
9.9 months
Inside a single season. This is the easy version of this decision.
Real arithmetic, running in your browser, on figures you control. Nothing is sent anywhere. The defaults are industry ranges, not your property - change them.
One company now decides what your rooms cost you
The Greek market is large and still growing. What changed is who stands between you and the guest, and how little competition there is left for that position.
- 66.1%
- of every OTA booking in Europe goes through Booking.com alone, and 85.4% through it and Expedia together, while hotels' own direct share has slid six points since 2013, to 51.3% Source: HOTREC, European Hotel Distribution Study 2026
- 25-30%
- effective OTA commission once promotional programmes stack, against a 15-18% headline rate Source: Cloudbeds, OTA commission rates 2026
- €12.5bn
- Greek hotel sector turnover, up 8.7%, across roughly 10,118 hotels and 450,000 rooms Source: Hospitality Net, Greek hospitality Q2 2026
What we build, and the PMS we will not sell you
There are good ones and you may already have one. We build the parts a product cannot do, and connect them to the parts you keep.
A booking engine on your own site
Dates, availability, rates, extras, payment, confirmation - in your own design, on your own domain, in Greek and English and whatever else your market speaks. Two-step, mobile-first, and fast, because the abandonment happens on the third tap and on the second second of loading.
- Next.js
- Stripe
- Viva Wallet
- Multi-currency
- Greek + EN
Channel manager and PMS integration
Your engine talking to the channel manager you already pay for, so a direct booking closes the room everywhere within seconds rather than at the next sync. Where a legacy PMS has no usable API we read what it does have and say plainly that it is an import, not an integration.
- Availability sync
- Rate plans
- Webhooks
- Reconciliation
Rules a template cannot express
Minimum stay by season, closed-to-arrival Saturdays, seven-night changeover for villas, unit-type substitution, group logic, deposits that differ by lead time. This is where off-the-shelf engines fail, and it is nearly always the reason someone calls us.
- Min stay
- CTA/CTD
- Deposits
- Yield rules
Villas, rooms and multi-property portfolios
One back office over many units and owners: per-owner statements, cleaning and changeover schedules, key handover, AMA numbers on every listing, and the short-stay declarations that follow each booking.
- Multi-unit
- Owner statements
- AMA
- Housekeeping
What it connects to, rather than replaces
You already run on several of these. The job is usually connecting them, not replacing them.
- Channel managers
- WuBook, Octorate, SabeeApp, hoteliga, Cloudbeds - availability and rates in both directions.
- OTAs
- Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and Vrbo, through your channel manager rather than around it.
- Greek payments
- Viva Wallet, Stripe, Alpha e-Commerce, Piraeus and NBG gateways, plus IRIS for domestic guests.
- myDATA / ΑΑΔΕ
- Receipts and invoices transmitted properly, and short-stay declarations filed per booking against your AMA.
- Door locks and access
- Salto, Nuki, TTLock - codes generated on confirmation and expiring on checkout.
- Email and messaging
- Pre-arrival sequences, Viber and WhatsApp confirmations, review requests timed after checkout.
What it costs, against the commission you already pay
Compare each of these against the commission figure the calculator gave you. If the payback is longer than two seasons, do not do it - and we will be the ones to tell you.
Booking engine on your site
€4.5k - €9k
A direct-booking flow in your own design, connected to your existing channel manager, taking payment and issuing confirmations. The commonest first project and usually the one with the shortest payback.
Engine plus the awkward rules
€10k - €17.5k
The above, plus the availability logic no template will express: seasonal minimum stays, changeover days, deposits by lead time, unit substitution, group handling.
Portfolio back office
€17.5k - €27.5k
Many units and owners in one system: owner statements, changeover and cleaning schedules, access codes, AMA and short-stay compliance, and the reporting that replaces the spreadsheet.
Card processing is separate and is not ours - budget roughly 1.2-1.9% per transaction depending on your gateway and card mix. It is in the calculator above, because leaving it out would flatter the payback.
What we measure once the calculator stops guessing
The calculator above gives you a projection. These are the four numbers that tell you afterwards whether it was right.
- Direct share of room nights
- Before and after, by month. Seasonality moves this more than anything we build, so a single before-and-after pair proves nothing.
- Commission not paid
- Direct room nights times your effective rate. The only figure that pays for the build.
- Abandonment by step
- Where in the flow people leave. Usually dates, and usually because availability said no without saying why.
- Unsellable gaps avoided
- How often the engine refused a booking to protect a longer one, and what the refused nights were worth.
What we have shipped
Work for clients and tools we run in public, each labelled as which it is. Where the tool is the demo above, you can check it yourself instead of taking our word for it.
4
Rules the engine expresses that a template cannot: seasonal minimum stay, closed-to-arrival days, changeover, orphan gaps
Our own tool · Hospitality · 2026
The booking engine that knows about Saturdays
The OTAs take 15 to 18% headline, and up to 30% once the visibility programmes stack. This is the booking engine that wins back the guests who already knew your name - including the stays a template refuses and an OTA happily takes.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Postgres
- Stripe
- Viva Wallet
What we can build
None of these exists. Each is a system we have specified for this sector at the level of detail we would start from: the parts that are hard, the decisions that would have to be made early, and what would be worth measuring once it runs.
Proposal
Short-term rentals
Sixty units, one changeover Saturday
The back office for a managed villa portfolio - owner statements, changeover logistics, access codes and the compliance paperwork each booking generates.
- Next.js
- Postgres
- Flutter
- TTLock
- myDATA
Questions we get asked about this
- How much does a booking engine cost?
- The bands are on this page: €4.5k-€9k for a booking engine on your own site connected to the channel manager you already pay for, €10k-€17.5k once the availability rules stop fitting a template, €17.5k-€27.5k for a portfolio back office. What a band cannot tell you is which one you are, because one hotel and sixty villas are not the same project. The shape around it is fixed: a scoping week, priced on its own and yours to keep, ending in a written scope and a fixed price for phase one. Bring last season's commission figure and the share of bookings that came through the OTAs and you will leave the first call knowing your band. Card processing always goes to your gateway, never to us.
- Which booking engine should we choose?
- If you have one property, one rate plan and no unusual rules, buy one rather than building it. WuBook, Octorate, SabeeApp, hoteliga and Cloudbeds all sell a booking engine that takes a card and talks to your channel manager, and a year of any of them costs less than a week of our time. Ask two questions before you sign: can it express your actual availability rules, and can you change how it looks without waiting on somebody's roadmap. We get called when the answer to one of those is no - usually a portfolio with different rules per property, a villa with a seven-night changeover, or a brand that cannot be seen in a template.
- Is there a free booking engine?
- There are free and near-free ones, and for a small property they are a genuinely good answer: take the booking, take the card, stop paying commission on the guest who already knew your name. What you give up is the design, the awkward availability rules and usually the guest data. The honest test is the calculator on this page - if the commission you would keep over a season does not clear the cost of a build, a free tool is not a compromise, it is the right decision, and we would rather say that on the call than sell you a project.
- How much will direct bookings actually go up?
- We will not give you a number, because anybody who gives you one without seeing your books is guessing. What we can tell you is what the number depends on: how much of your demand already knows your name, whether you have anything to offer that rate parity does not cover - a transfer, a late checkout, a better room - and how hard your current site makes it to book on a phone. The calculator on this page sweeps the share you might win direct and names the smallest one that still pays back inside two seasons. If your own honest guess is below that line, the build is not worth doing.
- What is the commission on Booking.com in Greece?
- The headline rate is typically 15-18%, but the effective rate reaches 25-30% once you opt into the visibility and preferred-partner programmes that most properties use to stay competitive. That is the number to compare a build against, not the headline - and the calculator on this page lets you enter your own.
- Will building a booking engine break rate parity?
- No, and you should not try to. Parity clauses restrict the rate you publish, not what you include with it. Direct booking is won on the transfer, the late checkout, the breakfast, the room upgrade and the returning-guest rate - all of which are software features, and none of which breach a parity clause.
- Should we replace our PMS?
- Usually not. If your PMS handles arrivals, housekeeping and folios adequately, replacing it is expensive and risky for no gain. The gap is nearly always the guest-facing booking flow and the rules behind it, which is what we build and connect. If your PMS genuinely cannot be integrated with, we will say so and give you the cost of both paths.
- Do you work with villas and short-term rentals, not just hotels?
- Yes, and the software problem is different enough to be worth naming. Villas mean changeover days, seven-night minimums, owner statements, cleaning logistics and key handover - and, from 20 May 2026, an EU-wide registration requirement with platforms obliged to verify it. A hotel engine handles almost none of that well.
- Can it handle Greek payment methods?
- Viva Wallet, Stripe, IRIS and the Alpha, Piraeus and NBG gateways all come up regularly, and we have no preference between them beyond what your fees and settlement times look like. Deposits, balances due before arrival, and refunds under your own cancellation rules are part of the build.
- How long does it take, and can it be ready for the season?
- A booking engine is typically six to nine weeks from the first call, which means a build starting in autumn is comfortably live for the following season and one starting in April is not. Greek early booking momentum is now strong enough that being live late costs a real part of the year.
- What about myDATA and the short-stay declarations?
- Receipts and invoices transmit to myDATA as part of the build, and for short-term rentals each booking's stay declaration is filed against your AMA rather than typed in later. Getting this wrong is a fine, so it is treated as a functional requirement and not an add-on.
The other four
- Business automationIf your team does it the same way every day, software can do itFor any company where people retype, copy and chase all day€3k – €6kFirst automation, one task
- Restaurants & groupsA restaurant is a floor plan, not a number of coversFor restaurant groups, not for a single taverna€3.5k - €7.5kOwn ordering and booking channel
- Maritime & logisticsOne spreadsheet should not be load-bearingFor shipowners, managers and freight operators€10k - €20kOne spreadsheet, replaced properly
- Clinics & diagnosticsWhen the practice outgrew the practice softwareFor multi-site clinics, diagnostic centres and dental groups€6k - €12.5kThe scheduling layer
Bring the commission figure
The most useful first call starts with what the OTAs actually cost you last year and what share of your bookings came through them. Twenty minutes, and you will leave knowing whether a build pays for itself and roughly how fast.
Or write to hello@appcrafters.gr.