The direct advantage

Blessy Townes, vice president and head of digital marketing and branding at Discovery Hospitality, shares how the Filipino hotel group built its in-house digital marketing capabilities to drive direct bookings, reduce reliance on OTAs and increase revenue

Why did you pioneer Discovery Hospitality’s digital transformation? How did you do it, and how does it differ from the traditional hotel booking model?
I’ve been doing digital marketing for 25 years now and I come from a background where e-commerce is much broader. Before I joined the hospitality industry, I was doing retail, SEO (search engine optimisation), e-learning and pay-per-click advertising.

In digital marketing, e-commerce is about selling over the internet whether it’s on the website or social media. Selling can be done directly or through a distribution channel and there’s a payment gateway involved. But in the hospitality industry, e-commerce means OTAs like Expedia, Booking.com, etc. It’s very convenient because there’s no upfront cost.

Usually in the industry, you have your marketing communications team and then you work with a digital agency to assist you. Initially, I thought it was just in the Philippines that properties or brands are reluctant to allocate a budget for marketing which is seen traditionally as just an expense. They think it’s just public relations, just blogger hosting with no guarantee of conversion into actual bookings. So they’d rather pay commission to OTAs based on materialised bookings.

What sets Discovery Hospitality apart is that we built our in-house direct booking expertise. Direct booking is at the heart of our digital strategy. When I joined Discovery Hospitality in 2014, I spearheaded digital marketing, which included building the team and establishing a direct booking partnership with travel digital marketing platform Sojern. When we say digital, it’s going to convert into direct booking.

The beauty of Sojern’s commission model is that you don’t have to pay anything upfront. You don’t pay anything until it drives a booking. You only pay them when they perform. While an OTA drives travellers to an OTA website, Sojern does digital marketing and drives travellers to the property’s website.

Where we are right now, we deliver the revenue and the revenue contribution of digital marketing is way higher than the contribution of OTAs or the e-commerce companies.

You get a higher profit margin when you get bookings directly versus getting them through an OTA. When you work with an OTA, you pay as high as 30 per cent commission, but for our bookings, the average cost per acquisition is only three per cent. Imagine the stark difference. It’s way lower in direct booking.

Why else are you advocating direct booking in Asia and even in the US?
It doesn’t all boil down to commercial terms. Direct booking enables the hotel to collect guest info like their email addresses so they can re-market or upsell them before the guests’ arrival or even after their departure. They’re able to send guests emails and (other) communications to keep them engaged so that the hotels stay top of mind when they’re planning for their next trip. Data is king. Owning the guest data is something that you are not getting when you partner with OTAs.

With guest data, we’re able to deliver better and more intuitive service and that, of course, gives us the brand love and memorable experience. Guests speak directly with us because they trust the brand and know that we are going to deliver that experience consistently.

Right now in the industry, when you think of booking directly, there’s a special offer that’s exclusive on the website. But for Discovery Hospitality, booking direct is not just about putting up offers. For us, it’s a mindset – it’s about shifting the experience from the cold transactions of booking via an OTA to a long-term relationship.

Brand love for us is very important. When a guest books directly with us, we own that relationship from the very first click, giving us rich first-party data to personalise the entire stay. And of course, Discovery has always been known for personalising the guest experience, and our trademark is service that’s all heart.

Also, while it’s easy and convenient to outsource to third parties, having in-house expertise lets you bypass agency retainers so that brings down your cost and increases your return on ad spend or return on investment (ROI). Hence, you maintain full control of the performance metrics and compared to other brands or other properties, Discovery Hospitality takes full ownership every month when it tracks the expenses, share of revenue and ROI. Performance marketing for us is very important and that’s also why we work closely with Sojern because, as you know, we don’t have unlimited budgets like the OTAs. We have to make sure that our ad spend is just as hard-working when it comes to delivering the revenue.

Tech advancements like AI and changing travel trends are reshaping hotels’ revenue direction and the position of OTAs in the pecking order of hotel bookings.
We were personalising experiences long before the age of AI. That’s why we always say we are a plus AI company. The culture of care is there and AI simply amplifies the experience instead of just delivering personalisation because AI is there.

Even in the beginning, despite being a Filipino brand, I didn’t see Discovery competing against our comp sets or the ones within the area. For me, Discovery will compete against the global hotel chains and the OTAs.

Back in 2019, there was an article on Philippine destination marketing where I was quoted saying that “if one’s business is not on Google, it doesn’t exist”. Traditional hotel marketing communications teams back then rarely prioritised search engine optimisation (SEO). So when I built the team, SEO was placed at the heart of our integrated marketing communication. Today, SEO has evolved from search engine optimisation to search everywhere optimisation, and that includes generative engine optimisation. Because our foundational architecture was built right, the transition to generative engine optimisation was completely natural for us.

Sojern is powered by AI while Discovery Hospitality has been using Google’s platform since the very beginning. We started 10 years ago and that has allowed us to target the ones with high booking intent and users that are going to deliver us the higher revenue. In terms of visibility, it’s not being present everywhere. It’s about being present where it’s going to resonate and convert your guests or the users into bookings.

You mentioned that digital marketing contributes more revenue than OTAs. Could you share the figures?
When you work with OTAs, you pay 18 to 30 per cent commission based on materialised bookings. With Sojern, together with our in-house digital marketing team, our average cost per acquisition is only three per cent.

Direct bookings now outpace OTA bookings by a ratio of 3:2. Groupwide, Discovery Hospitality’s revenue share from direct bookings was below 30 per cent before we partnered with Sojern. Now our share of direct bookings is 60 per cent, with just 40 per cent from OTAs. It’s way higher than the industry average of about 30 per cent direct bookings and 70 per cent OTA bookings.

Sojern drove 20 per cent of total booking revenue in 2025, more than double 2023’s contribution.

At Discovery Boracay, direct bookings now outpace OTA bookings by 83 per cent to 17 per cent (versus published industry averages of 31 per cent across South-east Asia and 32.5 per cent in the Philippines).

That’s quite a big feat for an independent hotel company.
It’s a digital transformation journey. We had to revamp the website, change the booking engines, and come up with social media strategies – it was really an optimisation of the different channels.

What I like about Sojern is that they do not compete with or replace what we are doing, but complement it. (Considering) the support that we get, the technology behind the platform and, of course, the relationship, Sojern is still the most comprehensive when it comes to creating not only the bookings or the conversions but as well as the visibility for Discovery Hospitality.

The challenge is that our ROI is too high. That’s because over the years we’re able to optimise our campaigns. We don’t have an unlimited budget for advertising like the OTAs but with the budget that we have and with the risk-free model that we work or we use with Sojern, we’re able to bring down the cost per acquisition and increase our ROI.

Our goal next year is not to increase the ROI but to keep it at an agreeable level where we get higher revenue from our direct booking investment.