Revenue & Reporting
October 2026
Open a hotel's commercial report and you will often see the same list: corporate, leisure, groups, OTA, direct. Four of those describe guests. One of them describes a booking channel, and mixing the two hides money.
A market segment tells you who the guest is and why they came. A distribution channel tells you how the booking reached you. A leisure couple is a leisure couple whether they booked on your website, through an agent, or on an OTA. The stay is the same. What changes is what the booking cost you.
When OTA appears in reports as if it were a type of guest, two problems follow. Pricing decisions get made on channel behaviour instead of guest behaviour, and the cost of distribution disappears into the averages. Two identical couples in the same room on the same night can be worth very different amounts to the hotel, and a report that blends segment and channel will never show you that.
Read separately, the picture gets practical. Your segments tell you who values your property. Your channels tell you what each booking costs. And the most useful question the split raises is simple: how many of the guests who arrived through an expensive channel can be brought back through a cheap one, by staying in touch after they leave?
Stay In Motion works on this layer for independent hotels: the follow-up after checkout. If you want a clear read on what your past guests currently hear, start with the Guest Lifecycle Audit, or see how it plays out in the case studies.