Plume Collection
Cape Town, South Africa — 16 weeks
The Problem
Plume operated 4 luxury boutique hotels with 80% of bookings running through third-party OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia) at 18–22% commission. Their own website converted at 0.8% — far below industry benchmarks — losing $900,000 in commission fees annually.
The Solution
Direct booking engine redesign, room-level social proof (review snippets, TripAdvisor rating embedded at point of decision), urgency mechanics (real-time availability signals), loyalty programme prominence, and a 3-email post-abandonment sequence for partial bookings.
Direct Revenue Generated
Direct booking rate increased from 20% to 47% of total reservations within 4 months. Annual savings from OTA commission reduction exceeded $1.8M. Website conversion rate went from 0.8% to 3.2%.
The Transformation
The Trajectory
Revenue Trajectory
The Deep Dive
OTA dependency is the hospitality industry's most expensive habit. Plume paid $900,000 in commission in 2024 — money that went entirely to platforms that own the customer relationship. We rebuilt Plume's direct booking experience to be objectively better than any OTA: faster, more personal, and with perks unavailable anywhere else. The commission savings alone funded 10 years of digital maintenance.