A hard look at where the bookings actually go, and how hospitality businesses can take their visibility back.
Let me tell you about a woman I have met many times, in many cities, wearing many different name tags. For today, call her Madam Ngozi.
She runs a decent hotel in Abuja. Wuse, maybe Jabi. Forty rooms, clean, good staff, reliable light. Business looks healthy on the surface: rooms fill during conference season, December brings the diaspora wave, corporate guests come and go. But every month, when she sits alone with the accounts, the same quiet wound opens. A painful slice of her revenue has gone to booking platforms, commissions of fifteen to twenty-five percent on rooms she cleaned, staffed, powered with diesel, and serviced with her own hands. The guests slept in her building. The profit slept somewhere else.
One evening, out of curiosity, she searches her own hotel’s name on Google. The first result is not her website. It is a booking platform’s page about her hotel, running paid adverts on her hotel’s own name, selling her rooms back to her at a commission. Her actual website, the one her nephew built in 2021, sits below it, slow and outdated, wearing photos from the opening ceremony.
If any part of Madam Ngozi’s evening feels familiar, whether you run a hotel, a shortlet business, a travel agency, a tour company, or an airport transfer service, I need you to sit with an uncomfortable sentence for a moment.
You do not have a customer shortage. You have a visibility shortage, and you are renting your own visibility back from middlemen at a price that is quietly strangling you.
This article is about ending that arrangement, or at least renegotiating it from a position of strength.
How the trap closed, one sensible decision at a time
Nobody signs up to be dependent. It happens in stages, and every stage feels like progress.
Madam Ngozi listed on the booking platforms years ago because they brought guests she could not reach. Sensible. Then the platforms, with their enormous marketing budgets, out-ranked her for every search that matters in her city: hotels in Abuja, shortlets in Wuse 2, affordable hotels near the airport. In time they out-ranked her for her own name. Now the guest who heard about her hotel from a colleague, a guest who was already hers, searches the name, lands on the platform, and books through it. She pays commission on word of mouth she generated herself. That is a toll gate built across her own driveway, and she is the one who paid for the road.
While this was happening, the searches themselves changed shape around her. Travellers now ask Google and AI assistants full questions, the way they would ask a friend: good hotel in Abuja for a work conference, under 80k, with strong WiFi that actually works. The machines answer by reading what the internet says about each hotel, the reviews, the mentions, the answered questions, the descriptions. Hotels with rich, consistent, well-tended digital footprints get named in those answers. Hotels whose entire online existence is a thin platform listing get summarised by that listing, or skipped entirely.
And the December wave, her most profitable guests of the year? Nigerians abroad plan those trips months ahead, entirely through their screens, from Houston and London and Toronto. They cannot walk past her gate and admire the building. If her presence cannot be found and trusted from four thousand miles away, the diaspora money books elsewhere, usually through, you guessed it, a platform that will charge her for the introduction.
The audit she never wanted, and what it found
Suppose Madam Ngozi finally asks someone like me to look under the bonnet. I have done this audit for enough Nigerian hospitality businesses to tell you what we almost always find, and I will tell it to you the way I would tell her, plainly, because politeness has kept too many businesses poor.
Her Google Business Profile turns out to be half-dead. The photos are years old, one phone number is wrong, and eleven reviews sit unanswered, including a harsh one about a generator failure from 2023 that every prospective guest has read and she has never seen. For a hospitality business, that profile is the reception desk on the internet, and hers has been unstaffed for years while she polished the physical one daily.
Her website cannot close a sale even when someone finds it. It takes eight seconds to load on mobile data, prices are hidden behind a contact form nobody fills, and there is no path to book or even reach WhatsApp in one tap. The platforms let a guest book in ninety seconds. So even travellers who discover her directly bounce back to the middleman to finish the job. She is not losing them at discovery. She is losing them at the door, which is the more painful place to lose anybody.
And when I ask the question that decides everything, who on your team owns this, the answer is the usual silence. The manager runs operations. The social media person posts flyers for Sunday brunch. Nobody does the search work, because nobody was ever trained to, and the owner assumed the platforms had it covered. The platforms do have it covered. That is precisely the problem.
Taking it back
Now the way out, and let me be honest about the destination first. This is not a fantasy where she deletes the booking platforms tomorrow; they remain a useful channel among several. The goal is narrower and more powerful: stop them being the only road, so that a growing share of guests find her directly and book her directly, commission-free, month after compounding month.
The first territory to reclaim is her own name. She completes and verifies the Google Business Profile properly: current photos of the actual rooms, correct contact details written in full international format so a caller from Toronto can dial them, services listed, every review answered with patience, including the 2023 generator complaint, which gets a calm, factual reply about the new backup system. Then the website gets rebuilt around one job, converting the visitor who is already interested: fast on Nigerian mobile data, prices visible, fresh photographs, and a booking path that works in two taps, even if that path is simply a well-run WhatsApp Business line. Every guest captured directly is commission recovered, and unlike a platform invoice, this saving repeats forever.
The second territory is the questions. She sits with her front desk staff and writes down everything guests ask before booking. Is there constant light? How far from the airport, truly, in Abuja traffic? Does the WiFi carry a video call? Is the area safe at night? Can we hold a small event? Then she answers each one honestly and publicly, on her site and her profile. Those honest answers are what rank for the long, conversational searches travellers now make, and they are exactly the material AI assistants quote when somebody asks where to stay. In this industry, the plain-spoken answer page has become the new lobby: it is where the guest decides how they feel about you before they ever arrive.
The third territory is December itself. She publishes her festive-season availability early, in October, explains plainly how to book and pay from abroad, shows proof of past diaspora guests with their permission, and answers messages first thing every morning knowing they were sent from another time zone at midnight. Nobody spends December money like a Nigerian who has not been home in four years, and that guest chooses the hotel that made choosing easy from far away.
The last territory is the one where most good intentions die, so she makes it concrete: somebody must own this work permanently, with hours and a mandate, and there are only two honest ways to arrange that. If she wants the capacity in-house, she takes her sharpest staff member and puts them through a structured program like the SEO growth marketing course, because for a forty-room hotel, one properly trained person tending the profile, reviews, content and rankings is often the highest-return hire on the entire payroll. If she would rather have it handled by people who do this all day and understand the industry’s peculiar economics, the platform dependency, the seasonality, the diaspora patterns, that is the work our SEO for travel and hospitality service exists for. And because her business lives in the capital, where conference traffic, government travel and December events make the search territory its own animal, our SEO company in Abuja team fights this exact fight on home ground.
Notice what none of these territories require: a huge budget, a foreign consultant, or permission from anybody. They require ownership, honesty, and consistency, which is to say, the same materials she built the hotel with.
The calculation that should keep you up tonight, then get you up tomorrow
Before you close this page, do one piece of arithmetic. Take last month’s total platform commissions. Multiply by twelve. Sit with the number.
For most mid-sized Nigerian hotels, that number would fund a trained full-time marketer, a properly rebuilt website, and a professional SEO engagement, with change remaining. You are already paying for marketing, generously. You are simply paying it to companies whose loyalty is to their commission, not your building, and who will happily place a competitor above you the moment the competitor pays for better placement.
The platforms are not villains. They are a channel, and channels charge. The failure is letting a channel become the landlord of your entire visibility, and landlords, as every Nigerian knows, do not reduce rent out of sympathy.
Madam Ngozi’s rooms are still clean. Her staff still greet guests like family. The building she sacrificed for still stands. The only thing that was ever missing is that the internet, and now the AI engines reading it, were never properly told her story, so they told the middleman’s version instead.
The guests are already searching, tonight, in her city and yours. The only question is whose name the search answers with.
Go and search your own business name right now, and look at what a stranger sees. That is where this whole journey begins.
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