A direct booking is a stay a guest books straight with you rather than through a channel like Booking.com or Airbnb. It is commission-free because no channel sits in the middle: nobody charges you a booking fee, a commission, for bringing you the guest. You pay only your payment provider's normal per-transaction fee, and nothing to Smoobu on top.
A direct booking arrives through your Website channel
When a guest books on your own website, Smoobu records the booking under the Website channel, alongside your Booking.com and Airbnb bookings in the Bookings list. It behaves like any other booking: it blocks the dates and appears on your Calendar. The difference that matters for your income is where it came from. No channel sent you this guest, so no channel takes a cut.
The tool that makes this possible is the Booking Engine, sitting on your website. For how the pieces fit together, see Booking Engine, Website Builder, Calendar iFrame: what each one is for.
Why there is no commission
Channels like Booking.com and Airbnb charge for bringing you a guest; that charge is their platform's price. A direct booking skips the platform entirely: the guest finds you, comes to your own site, and books with you. There is no middleman to pay, so the full booking price stays with you. That is the main reason hosts set up direct bookings.
What a direct booking can still cost you
Commission-free does not mean taking the payment online is free. When a guest pays by card, your payment provider (for example Stripe) charges its own small fee per transaction, taken from your payout.
Smoobu adds no fee of its own on direct-booking payments. The only per-payment cost is your provider's own fee. To set up online payments, see set-up-stripe.
Website and Direct are two different rows in your Bookings list
A booking a guest makes on your website is not the same thing in Smoobu as a booking you enter yourself. The guest's own booking through your site is recorded under the Website channel. A booking you type in by hand (for example after a phone call or an email) is recorded under Direct booking. Both are commission-free, but they are two separate channels in your Bookings list, so keep them apart when you read your numbers.
Related articles
- Booking Engine, Website Builder, Calendar iFrame: what each one is for
- set-up-your-booking-engine
- set-up-stripe
Still stuck?
If this didn't answer your question, the Smoobu team is happy to help. In Smoobu, open the Help menu to open a ticket or book a call slot, or use the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner for a quick question during business hours.
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