The real cost of restaurant booking commissions

Marketplaces and booking platforms charge in a few recognisable ways. Understanding the shape of each is the difference between a fee that buys you genuinely new diners and one that quietly taxes the regulars you'd have served anyway.

The three fee models, plainly

Most reservation platforms use some mix of these. The labels vary; the mechanics don't:

• Per-cover commission — a fixed amount for every guest seated through the platform. Scales directly with how full you are, which means a great night is also your most expensive night.
• Per-cover for marketplace bookings — often higher for diners who found you on the platform's own listing, lower or zero for bookings from your own website widget.
• Flat subscription — one predictable monthly price regardless of volume. The fee stops growing the moment your room does.

The trap isn't any single model — it's paying a volume-based fee on bookings that didn't need a marketplace to happen.

Do the year, not the cover

The reason commissions slip past scrutiny is that they're charged in small amounts, constantly. Two euros here, a few there. Nobody feels a single cover. So instead of looking at the cover, look at the year. The arithmetic is simple and it's worth doing with your own numbers:

A worked illustration, using round numbers so you can swap in your own. Say a mid-size room seats 120 covers a night, six nights a week:

Your real figures will differ — the point is the order of magnitude. A "small" per-cover fee on a busy room is not a small number annually, and a meaningful slice of it is attached to guests who'd have booked you directly if you'd given them an easy way to.

What the fee does — and doesn't — buy

This isn't an argument that marketplaces are worthless. For genuine discovery — a visitor in an unfamiliar city, a diner with no particular restaurant in mind — a listing can introduce you to someone you'd never otherwise reach. That introduction has real value, and paying for it can be entirely rational.

The waste is everything after the introduction. Once a guest has chosen you, learned where you are and enjoyed the meal, every subsequent booking they make through the marketplace is a fee on a relationship you already own. The job is to move that repeat traffic onto a channel that doesn't charge per head.

The math on going direct

Direct bookings flip the cost structure. Instead of a fee that rises with every cover, you pay a flat price to run the booking channel, and the marginal cost of the next reservation is zero. A few covers a week recaptured from commission usually covers a flat subscription many times over.

Where direct bookings come from

• A booking button on your own website, taking from live availability.
• A link-in-bio page for Instagram and TikTok, where most discovery now starts.
• Google — appearing in search and maps with "Reserve" attached to your own page.
• The confirmation and reminder messages themselves, which keep guests in your channel for next time.

None of this means abandoning marketplaces overnight. It means making direct the default — the easiest, most visible way to book — so the marketplace earns its fee only on the discovery it genuinely provides.

Fee descriptions reflect publicly described pricing models and vary by platform, market and contract. Use your own rates and volumes for any real decision.