How Suiters' own booking channel saved them from high commission costs

Expensive CAC. Suiters never took bookings directly, and used to list their available units on other booking platforms like Idealista and Homelike. The commission rates of these websites were pretty high - around 10-15% - and wound up expensive for Suiters.

Pricing challenges. Prior to building its own booking system, Suiters had limited flexibility in deciding their unit pricing. It was a hassle to get it changed on an external booking platform.

Integration of booking channel with PMS. Previously, Suiters would manually add booking details received from sites onto their property management system at the time. This process was tedious, time consuming and prone to error.

Need for a customised dashboard. Atop the existing report generation feature, Suiters also wanted to build their own customised analytics dashboard.

Branded booking portal. Brahmastra Labs built Suiters a booking portal of their own which was branded and integrated to the Suiters website. This meant that Suiters was saving the fees they paid to booking engines (like HomeAlike) and had full operational freedom to list their units however they wanted.

Flexible pricing system. The tailor-made booking platform gave Suiters the freedom to decide between individual unit or category pricing, various seasonal pricing mechanisms, and custom pricing based on booking duration.

Automated booking integration. The new booking channel is connected to the platform's data storage; details of new bookings automatically gets stored accurately onto the system.

Custom analytics APIs. The team was also able to create APIs catering to Suiters' custom field data, allowing them to build customised reports.

The owned channel now accounts for 70% of total bookings, and cutting out third-party commissions brought a 55% reduction in CAC. More optimised pricing drove an 18% increase in overall occupancy, while automating the booking flow from OTAs saved 200 hrs/month of manpower cost. The custom dashboards enabled faster and better decisions.