Beating the OTAs at their own funnel
Heritage Resorts has been operating in the Himalayas for over a decade — but for the last eight years, 80% of their bookings came through OTAs at 18–25% commission. We built a direct-booking funnel that overtook OTA volume in nine months.
- Client
- Heritage Resorts (3 properties)
- Year
- Q2 2025
- Services
- Performance, Automation, Web
- Timeline
- 24 weeks
The challenge
OTAs aren’t the enemy — they’re a tax. The challenge wasn’t to leave Booking.com, it was to make Heritage’s own channels measurably better at converting the same intent. That meant a faster site, a tighter funnel, and a follow-up engine that didn’t feel like spam.
It also meant convincing a 60-year-old GM that a WhatsApp concierge would not make the brand feel cheap.
Guests trust an OTA because it asks for nothing upfront. We made our own funnel ask for less.
What we did
Funnel teardown
Mapped every step of an OTA booking and every step of theirs. Their site was losing 41% of intent at the date-picker. We rebuilt it as a single conversational scroll.
WhatsApp concierge
Real human concierge, real availability, real pricing — within 2 minutes of any enquiry, on the channel guests already use. Branded, scripted, but human.
Direct-booking ads
Meta and Google campaigns segmented by route (Delhi-NCR → Himachal weekend, vs. Punjab → 3-night stays). Different creative, different audiences, same destination.
Loyalty loop
Post-stay WhatsApp follow-up with a returning-guest rate that surprised everyone, including us. 28% of returning guests booked the next stay within 90 days.
Results
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