Case study
Aparthotel Barcelona — 72 units, three neighbourhoods
A 72-unit aparthotel portfolio spread across El Born, Poblenou and Gracia grew direct-booking share from 21% to 38% in six months. The catalyst was replacing four separate tools with Guest Talk.
Portfolio economics before Guest Talk.
Aparthotel Barcelona started as a single 12-unit building in El Born in 2018 and grew through acquisition. By 2024 the portfolio was 72 units across three Barcelona neighbourhoods, run by a lean team of six: a general manager, a revenue lead, two front-desk staff working shifts across all sites, and two housekeepers who moved between buildings with a shared cleaning van.
The tech stack had grown organically: one PMS for the original site (still in use, integrated poorly with the newer buildings), a spreadsheet for the two smaller acquisitions, a channel manager that supported only one of the PMSs, a WordPress booking widget that took payment via Stripe but did not close the loop with any of the PMSs. Marta Ferrer, the revenue lead, spent Monday mornings reconciling three availability calendars by hand.
The consolidation project.
The project ran over four weeks. Week one migrated the primary building's PMS. Week two consolidated the two acquired properties (previously spreadsheet-managed) into the Guest Talk multi-property mode. Week three built the channel-manager mappings across the full portfolio: Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, Vrbo and a Spanish regional OTA. Week four replaced the old WordPress booking widget with the Guest Talk booking engine, themed to match the existing site's brand palette.
The Google Hotel Ads free links were enabled during week four. Metasearch bidding on Trivago and Kayak (Growth plan feature) was configured to a starting daily budget of EUR 25 per property.
Six months of direct-booking growth.
The direct-booking numbers moved in three distinct waves.
Weeks 1-4. No meaningful change. The old booking widget was replaced with the Guest Talk widget; conversion moved from 1.7% to 2.4% on the same traffic, roughly a 40% lift in direct-conversion rate but only a small absolute number.
Weeks 5-12. Google Hotel Ads free links kicked in. Direct-booking share moved from 21% to 30%. Marta describes it as “the first month my Monday morning did not start with a spreadsheet reconciliation.”
Weeks 13-24. Metasearch bidding and the abandoned-cart recovery flow drove the final push. Direct-booking share settled at 38%, where it has stayed for the last three months. On a monthly gross revenue of EUR 140,000, the OTA-commission avoidance is roughly EUR 3,900 per month.
What Marta says.
“Our direct booking share went from 21 to 38 percent in six months. The booking widget on our WordPress site converts better than the OTAs. But honestly, the bigger change is that I get my Mondays back — the calendar reconciliation used to eat the whole morning.”