Casa del Callejón raised direct bookings 41% in six months.
42 rooms, one boutique, one revenue manager. How a family-owned hotel in Madrid moved off a decade-old on-premise PMS to Sabee in three weeks — and made back the switching cost inside the first quarter.
The property
Casa del Callejón is a 42-room boutique hotel two streets from the Palacio Real in Madrid. It has been in the same family since 1996, sits at the intersection of a business-travel and leisure market, and is staffed by 22 people including a general manager who is also the de-facto revenue manager.
Before Sabee
Casa del Callejón ran on an on-premise Windows PMS installed in 2013. It received one major update in 2018 and had not received a security patch since. The channel manager was a separate product that talked to the PMS through an overnight CSV, meaning any rate change made after 22:00 did not propagate until 05:00 the next morning. Accounting was reconciled manually against three OTA statements every week.
The direct booking widget on their website came from a fourth provider and had not been touched in three years. It did not work on mobile devices below 400 pixels wide, which cut about a third of their organic traffic out of the funnel before it ever reached a rate.
The switch
The migration was scoped for four weeks and finished in three. Sabee's onboarding consultant flew to Madrid for a two-day discovery, sat with the reception team through two full shifts, and mapped the existing rate plans and cancellation rules to Sabee's rate engine on the second afternoon. The old PMS was decommissioned on a Sunday morning; Sabee went live at 07:00; the first Booking.com reservation of the day landed in the new tape-chart at 07:23.
Staff training happened in two 90-minute sessions on the following Monday and Wednesday, run by the same onboarding consultant who had done the discovery. There was no third-party trainer, no separate change-management workshop, no video course to follow.
What changed in operations
The obvious win was the tape-chart. Reception stopped printing the arrivals sheet each morning and started reading it on screen — the housekeeping status was live on the same view, so a receptionist could seat an early check-in ten seconds after the room went ready. The general manager stopped opening five separate windows to answer the question "how many rooms are we selling tonight and at what rate".
The less obvious win was the direct booking engine. Sabee's mobile-first widget went live on the hotel's website the same weekend as the migration. Direct-booking conversion improved from 1.9% to 3.3% within two weeks, and the recovered volume of direct bookings replaced approximately €2,100 per month of OTA commission.
The truth is we did not switch to Sabee for the direct booking engine — we switched because the old PMS was going to be end-of-life in eighteen months. The direct booking result was a bonus, but it is the number we quote when other independent hoteliers ask what changed.
— Marta L., General Manager, Casa del Callejón
Six months in
By the six-month mark, the hotel had connected Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, Hotelbeds and their own website. Weekly reconciliation of OTA payouts, which used to consume the accountant's Wednesday afternoon, now runs during the accountant's morning coffee. The Guest CRM has recognised 460 repeat guests over 12 months and the pre-arrival email flow is bringing in an average of 0.7 upsells per stay.
What is next
Casa del Callejón is opening a second property in Toledo in 2026 and it will run on Sabee from day one, using the multi-property module to give the group's revenue team a single view of both hotels. The Toledo project is currently the reference implementation we point aparthotel-conversion projects at.
Ready to see what changes for your hotel?
Start a pilot workspace or talk to us — we will estimate the migration timeline and the direct-booking uplift for your specific mix of channels.