What would Sabee actually save your property?

How the formula works

The Sabee ROI calculator is deliberately simple, because a transparent formula you can check by hand is more useful than an opaque number you have to trust blindly. Here is exactly what it does with your five inputs:

First, it works out how many room-nights you sell in a year: rooms × 365 × current occupancy. Second, it works out what share of those nights currently go through commission-charging OTAs: 100% minus your direct-booking share. Multiplying those together, by your average rate and your current commission percentage, gives your annual OTA commission bill today — the number most operators have never actually seen written down in one place.

From there, the calculator applies two conservative, well-documented effects of moving onto a proper channel manager and a zero-commission booking engine. The first is a direct-booking lift: properties that install a genuinely usable booking engine and stop losing bookings to OTA-only search typically see direct share rise by around eight percentage points within the first two quarters. Every one of those room-nights that moves from an OTA to your own booking engine keeps 100% of the commission that would otherwise have been paid away. The second effect is time: manually keying rates and availability across multiple OTA extranets costs the average small property about four hours a week of a revenue manager's or GM's time; a channel manager that syncs automatically gives that time back, which we value at a modest €30/hour blended rate — a deliberately conservative figure for a manager-level task.

Add the recovered commission and the recovered time together and you get the estimated annual saving shown in the widget above. Compare that figure to the Growth plan's list price of €828 a year and you have a rough return-on-investment multiple for your own numbers.

The assumptions, stated plainly

No savings estimate is more honest than its assumptions, so here they are without hedging:

• The 8-percentage-point direct-booking lift is an average across Sabee customers in their first two quarters, not a guarantee — some properties starting from a very low direct share see more, some starting already high see less.
• The 4-hours-a-week time saving assumes you are currently updating two or more OTA extranets manually, at least in part; if you already have an automated channel manager elsewhere, your time saving from switching will be smaller.
• The €30/hour rate for recovered time is a blended estimate for a GM or revenue-manager-level task in a small-to-mid-size independent property; adjust it upward if your own team's time is worth more to you.
• The calculator does not include the removed cost of your previous PMS or channel-manager subscription, which is usually additional savings on top of what is shown here.
• All figures exclude VAT and any payment-processing fees, which are separate from Sabee regardless of which PMS you use.

Sensitivity: what moves the number most

Two inputs matter far more than the rest. Occupancy and average rate set the size of your entire revenue base, so a 60-room property at 55% occupancy and a 20-room boutique at 85% occupancy can land on a similar room-nights figure — check that yours is realistic for a full year, including your low season, rather than a peak-month number. The other high-leverage input is your current direct-booking share: a property starting at 10% direct has much more room to gain from the 8-point lift than one already at 45% direct, where OTA dependence is already low and the achievable lift is naturally smaller. If your current direct share is unusually high, treat the estimate as conservative rather than inflated.

Real numbers from real properties

The assumptions above are not theoretical — they come from properties who have actually made the move. Casa del Callejón, a 42-room boutique hotel in central Madrid, raised direct bookings by 41% within six months of switching to Sabee and removed roughly €2,100 a month in OTA commission in the process. The Prague Bunkhouse, a 180-bed independent hostel, doubled its direct bookings against the prior year while also cutting its Friday-night check-in queue in half — proof that the time savings and the revenue gains tend to arrive together, not as a trade-off. Milano Corti, a 42-unit aparthotel operator across three buildings in Milan, removed around nine hours a week of manual reconciliation once its channels, smart locks and accounting were unified on one platform, on top of whatever it saved on commission.

None of these three properties are identical in size or market, which is the point: the formula above scales with your own rooms, rate and occupancy rather than assuming every property behaves like a single reference case. Run your own numbers in the widget above, then read the full story behind whichever case looks closest to your own operation.

What the number does not capture

An ROI estimate this simple will always miss some real effects. It does not account for guest-experience improvements that show up as better reviews and, indirectly, better OTA ranking. It does not count the reduction in double-booking risk that comes from real-time two-way sync, which has a cost every time it happens but is hard to average into an annual figure. And it does not include what a cleaner accounting and reporting picture is worth to an owner who currently reconciles three OTA statements by hand every week. Treat the widget's output as a credible floor on the savings, not a ceiling.