Third-party booking and voucher platforms take a real cut. Industry figures put it at 20 to 30% per booking, before payment processing fees (Bokun.io, 2026). For a small Irish guesthouse, activity centre or tour operator, that's a fifth to a third of every sale gone before it reaches your account.
We saw this first-hand rebuilding the site for Kylemore Karting. Someone wants a voucher, and the old site sent them off to an unbranded third-party page to buy it. Once they left, that visitor wasn't a Kylemore customer for that purchase, they were a platform's customer who happened to buy from Kylemore.
What you actually lose when a customer leaves your site
- A cut of every sale, often a fifth to a third of it
- The customer's attention, on someone else's page, not yours
- A second system to check for their name and order, not automatically in your own site's tools
What actually works instead
- Keep the full sale price, not 20-30% less in platform commission
- Your brand stays in front of the customer, start to finish
- You own the customer data and relationship for next time
- One checkout that matches the rest of your site, not a bolt-on page
- A foundation your own SEO and AI-search work can actually build on
None of this is complicated, it's a sequencing problem. Kylemore's rebuild shipped the foundation first: real chatbot, real reviews, smart routing by group size. Bringing booking and voucher payment fully onto their own site is next, proven evidence before the bigger investment, not the other way round.
Where this fits with SMART Execution
This is the Evidence phase again: prove the foundation works, then build the piece that actually changes the economics. It's also why we don't claim results before they're real, Kylemore's voucher fix is next, not done, and that's exactly where it should say so.
Sending customers off-site to book or buy a voucher? Book a free call and let's look at what it's actually costing you.