Selling through comparison sites and OTAs without losing margin

The short answer: a comparison site or an OTA does not eat your margin because it charges commission. It eats your margin when you do not know what the commission is calculated on, and what that booking stops you selling at the counter. Before you decide which channels to list your fleet on, you need one figure per channel: what you actually keep per vehicle-day occupied, once the commission, the add-ons you no longer sell and the admin time have come out.

This article will not hand you a benchmark commission, because the one you are offered depends on your contract, your season and your location. It will hand you the method for working it out with your own numbers, and for deciding, channel by channel, how much fleet you give away and in which months.

What each channel charges, and what it charges it on

What everyone calls a comparison site is really three different business models, with very different consequences for your accounts. The difference is not in the shop window, which looks much the same, but in who takes the customer's money, who sets the rental conditions and who keeps the commercial relationship after the car comes back.

• Pure comparison site or metasearch: it sends you traffic, the booking closes on your own site or at your counter, and you invoice. You pay per click or per referred booking, and you keep the customer's contact details.
• Broker or prepaid OTA: it charges the customer and settles an agreed net rate with you. The commercial relationship is theirs, and the fuel policy, the excess and the cancellation terms were set by them before the customer walked into your office.
• Direct-booking marketplace: the customer books with you, you sign the rental agreement at the counter, and the channel charges commission for having brought that booking.
• Corporate intermediary or business travel agency: steady volume outside the season, but a negotiated rate, long payment terms and conditions you did not choose.

Before you sign, always ask the same question in very plain words: which amount is the commission calculated on. Applying it to the bare vehicle rate is not the same as applying it to the full billed total with add-ons, airport surcharge, out-of-hours delivery and second driver included. Two contracts with the same nominal commission can leave you with very different nets because of that one sentence.

A booking's real cost is more than the commission

If you compare channels by commission alone, the lowest commission always wins, and it is almost never the channel that leaves you the most. The real acquisition cost of a channel booking includes items that appear on no statement and are paid at the counter, in the workshop and in your cash flow.

• Add-ons the channel has already sold: if excess cover is bought at booking, your counter loses that sale and inherits a harder conversation.
• Fuel and cleaning policies imposed by the channel, which sometimes do not cover what it costs you to return the car to the state you handed it over in.
• No-shows and free cancellations: a day blocked in the calendar that never becomes a contract is fleet tied up with no income.
• Counter time: a booking that arrives with a voucher and someone else's conditions takes longer to hand over and generates more complaints.
• Damage and incidents: you handle the dispute, even though someone else took the money and the customer believes their contract is with the channel.

How to work out the net per channel with your own numbers

Do this properly once a year and review it each season in ten minutes. You do not need an analytics tool: you need your statements, your calendar and a spreadsheet.

1. 1Take every completed booking from one channel over a comparable period, keeping high season and low season apart. Mixing them gives you an average that describes no real month.
2. 2Write down the amount that actually landed in your account, not the amount the customer saw on screen. That is your base.
3. 3Subtract what that channel stops you selling: cover, add-ons and surcharges you would charge on your own site.
4. 4Subtract the operating cost you can attribute to it: extra counter minutes, cleaning and fuel you did not recover, complaints and refunds.
5. 5Divide the result by the vehicle-days that booking occupied, counting the gaps you could not sell because of the pick-up or drop-off time.
6. 6Repeat the calculation for your direct channel and charge it its real cost: advertising, website, payment gateway and the time spent answering calls, emails and messages.
7. 7Rank the channels by that net per vehicle-day occupied and allocate fleet in that order, always keeping a buffer for late direct business, which pays best of all.

Two surprises usually come out of this exercise. The first is that a channel with an uncomfortable commission can be the best deal in the house if what it fills is midweek days and quiet months, because it competes against a parked car. The second is that a channel which only brings you long weekends and August may be eating your best direct demand, the business that would have come in anyway and commission-free.

Channels compared: control, customer and margin leaks

This table carries no figures on purpose. What decides whether a channel suits you is not a published number, but who controls the conditions, who keeps the customer and where the margin leaks out.

Rate parity: what you can move and what you cannot

Many distribution contracts include a parity clause that stops you publishing a better rate on your own site than the one you give the channel. Breaking it casually is the fastest way to lose the channel and get a claim. The sensible route is not to undercut quietly, but to renegotiate what you sign and to compete on value where the clause does not reach.

• Read what parity actually covers: the published rate, the cancellation terms, the inventory you make available, or all of it at once.
• If you cannot undercut on your own site, compete on value: more flexible cancellation, delivery to the hotel or the terminal, a higher category when one is free, direct support in the customer's own language.
• Put in writing, on the listing and in the agreement, what the price includes: deposit, excess, fuel policy, mileage and additional-driver charges.
• Invoice under your own tax regime, with the correct value added tax for where you provide the service, even when the channel took the customer's money.

Selling on several channels without overbooking or double work

Multichannel distribution does not fail because of commissions. It fails because of the calendar. As soon as the same car is on display in three shop windows that do not talk to each other, you get the duplicate booking, the angry customer at the counter and the review that costs you a month of sales.

• One calendar as the single source of truth, with every channel looking at that calendar.
• Block maintenance, the roadworthiness test and transfers between offices as if they were bookings, because they tie up a car just the same.
• Decide what share of the fleet you expose to each channel, and revisit it by season rather than once a year.
• Watch the turnaround between a drop-off and the next pick-up: if you leave no gap for cleaning and checks, you pay for it in lost bookings.

Where a marketplace like DRIVO fits

DRIVO is a European marketplace for renting vehicles directly from trusted independent and local rental agencies, and from private owners, across Europe and North Africa. It serves France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Morocco and Tunisia, with France as the current focus market. For a Spanish agency, what matters is the cost model and who keeps the booking.

• Listing your fleet costs 0 €: no listing fee and no monthly fee.
• Commission is charged only on completed bookings, so an empty week costs you nothing.
• Payouts are settled automatically through Stripe.
• Listings are multilingual and reach travellers in five languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian and Arabic.
• Verified profile and reviews, so your reputation travels with you.
• A back-office with bookings, calendar and fleet management.