what is the expected roas on this performance marketing retainer?

Independent hotels should target an overall return on ad spend between 8x and 12x across paid search and metasearch channels, allowing direct booking acquisition costs to remain well below standard online travel agency commissions.

Hotel operators frequently face online travel agency (OTA) commission rates between 15% and 25% on gross room revenue. Shifting booking share to direct channels requires evaluating marketing spend against net margins, where agency retainers starting at $2,000 to $3,000 monthly must pay for themselves rapidly through direct commission savings.

If you only do one thing: Benchmark your channel return on ad spend (ROAS) against your property's average OTA commission threshold of 18%, ensuring every paid direct booking costs less than 10% to 12% all-in.

• Brand search baseline: Paid search on protected hotel brand terms should reliably generate a 10x to 15x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS, the gross direct booking revenue generated for every dollar spent on media) by capturing high-intent traveler demand.
• Metasearch performance: Google Hotel Ads and Trivago placements typically deliver an 8x to 12x ROAS when integrated directly with real-time property management engine pricing and live room inventory.
• Paid social and prospecting: Prospecting campaigns on Meta platforms generate a 3x to 6x direct ROAS, functioning primarily to introduce travel intenders into the booking pipeline before retargeting.
• Blended direct booking target: Across all managed paid channels, an effective performance strategy should maintain an 8x to 10x blended ROAS, representing a direct marketing cost of 10% to 12.5% per reservation.
• Retainer cost recovery timeline: Monthly agency retainers—which scale from $2,000 for single-platform execution to $8,000 or more for full-service portfolios—are typically recovered within 60 to 90 days through OTA commission displacement alone.

• Watch out for: Agency reporting that calculates ROAS exclusively on ad spend while hiding the monthly retainer fee, booking engine fees, and credit card merchant processing from the total acquisition cost.
• Watch out for: Over-allocating ad spend to brand search to artificially inflate ROAS numbers without acquiring net-new room nights or reducing OTA dependence.
• Watch out for: Direct rate disparity, because running paid campaigns when OTAs undercut your direct website rate will immediately drop ad conversion rates and lower campaign ROAS.

Audit your last 90 days of OTA commission payouts against total room nights to calculate your maximum viable cost per acquisition before setting channel ad budgets.