Independent hotels: a wallet pass that pulls bookings off the OTAs

Start with your own commission line

The case for a hotel loyalty pass is one subtraction, not a strategy deck. Take what you pay the online travel agencies each month, then ask how much of it went to re-acquiring guests who have already slept in your beds. That second number is the only budget this project needs.

Here is the model for a 30-room independent property. At 65% occupancy you sell about 585 room-nights a month out of 900 available. At a 420 SAR average daily rate, that is roughly 245,700 SAR of room revenue. If 55% of those nights arrive through an OTA, about 322 nights and 135,000 SAR of that revenue came from a platform.

Commission on the major platforms is commonly quoted between 15% and 25% of room revenue as of August 2026, and it climbs if you buy into visibility or preferred programs. At 18%, that 135,000 SAR carries about 24,300 SAR of commission a month, close to 292,000 SAR a year. Don't take my rate. Pull your last two statements, divide commission paid by room revenue booked, and use your own effective number for everything below.

Commission on a first-time guest is fair rent for demand you don't own. The repeat guest is the leak. You paid once to meet them, then you pay again for the same person, because the app holding their saved card is not yours.

What one direct repeat booking is worth, net

Price a single two-night stay both ways. Two nights at 420 SAR is 840 SAR of room revenue. Through an OTA at 18% commission you keep 689 SAR. Booked directly and paid by card on your own site, you keep 840 SAR minus roughly 2.5% in card processing, so about 819 SAR.

One repeat stay moved off a platform is therefore worth around 130 SAR to you. If the platform pays you by virtual card and you already absorb a processing fee on that side, your gap is wider than 130 SAR. Adjust the figure for how you actually get paid.

Now put software next to it. Waya's Growth plan is 85 SAR a month, which is 1,020 SAR a year at the monthly rate or 867 SAR paid annually. One two-night direct stay recovered each month returns about 1,560 SAR a year, so break-even sits at roughly two-thirds of one shifted stay a month. Premium at 149 SAR a month needs about 14 shifted stays across the year.

Scaled to the whole property the arithmetic gets more interesting and much less certain. Those 585 room-nights are perhaps 300 arrivals a month at a two-night average stay. If a quarter of arriving guests enroll, that is 75 cards a month and 900 in a year.

Say one in ten of those enrolled guests books again inside the year, and 60 of those 90 stays would otherwise have come through a platform. You kept about 9,000 SAR of commission against 1,020 SAR of software. Every percentage in that chain is an assumption I invented for the example, so replace them with your own before you believe the total.

Capture the guest at check-in, not after checkout

The pass has to be in the guest's wallet before they hand back the key. Once they check out you are bidding against the platform's own re-marketing, and the platform holds their email, their card, and their booking history. In-stay is the only window where you have their attention for free.

Three moments work at a front desk. The first is check-in, in the 40 seconds while the guest waits for a room key. The second is in the room: a small card by the kettle with the QR code and one line about what the pass gets them. The third is the folio conversation at checkout, which is the weakest of the three, because the guest is already half in the taxi.

The mechanics are deliberately dull. The guest scans a printed QR code, types a first name and a mobile number on one screen, then taps once to add the card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. Any other device or browser gets a web card instead. No app, no account, no password, about ten seconds of the guest's time.

On your side, a receptionist or night auditor scans the guest's card on an ordinary phone, using the web dashboard or the Waya merchant iOS app, to add a night or points. There is no hardware to buy and nothing to install at the desk. One card can cover several properties or branches, and every scan lands in the same dashboard.

What to put on the pass, and the parity question

Waya supports stamp, points, balance, and discount cards, so pick the shape that matches how you sell nights. Points suit a property with varied rates and long gaps between stays. A stamp card works when the reward is countable and blunt, like "your 8th night with us is on us". The design is yours: colors, logo, stamp count, reward wording, in Arabic or English.

Parity clauses in OTA contracts generally restrict what you advertise publicly, not what you hand an enrolled guest. A closed member group is the usual route around that, but read your own contract or ask whoever signs it, because the wording differs by platform and by year. As of August 2026 this is common practice in the market, not legal advice.

Non-rate value avoids the question entirely and often persuades better than a discount. Late checkout at 2 pm, an upgrade subject to availability, breakfast for two, a 100 SAR credit in the restaurant, the eighth night free. None of those touch your published rate, and none of them can be bought on a platform.

Once the pass is in the wallet it updates itself, and messages land on the phone's lock screen. There is also a passive branch-proximity reminder, configured on the Branches screen rather than on the card's own address fields. No SMS is involved, and no guest phone number is handed to a third-party messaging app. Free includes 100 messages a month, Growth 5,000, and Premium is uncapped.

Costs, caps, and where Waya stops

The Free plan is 0 SAR forever: up to 100 customers, 100 wallet messages a month, one stamp card, one branch, custom card design, and the full dashboard, with no credit card. At 75 enrollments a month a 30-room property reaches the 100-customer cap in about six weeks. The stop is hard. Enrolled guests keep their cards and keep collecting, but new sign-ups stop until you upgrade.

So treat Free as a six-week pilot, and budget 85 SAR a month if the pilot works. Growth adds unlimited customers, up to 10 cards, 3 branches, 5 staff accounts, 5,000 messages a month, Excel import for the guest list you already keep, and design help from our team. Premium at 149 SAR a month removes the caps on cards, branches, staff, and messages. There is no commission on sales, no per-card fee, and no setup fee at any tier.

What Waya does not do matters more for a hotel than for a cafe. There is no PMS or channel-manager integration, so nothing syncs with your rate plans, availability, or folios. There is no POS integration and no SMS sending. The dashboard cannot take a booking either: the direct booking still happens on your own site, on the phone, or over WhatsApp. The merchant app ships on iOS, and the Android build is still in closed testing.

On alternatives, here is the landscape with vendor-published prices as of August 2026, which you should verify before signing anything. Niqati is the best-known name in the Saudi market and leads on search share, with quote-based subscription pricing. Btaqa publishes tiers at 108, 250, and 380 SAR a month. OneCup is around 150 SAR a month, and Watily is 149 SAR a month with loyalty bundled into a wider plan. Most of them issue wallet passes too, so the real structural difference is the starting line: they all begin with a paid subscription, and Waya begins at 0 SAR up to 100 customers with no credit card.

A 90-day scorecard your front desk can keep

Four numbers, written weekly on the shift handover sheet. Cards issued divided by arrivals is your enrollment rate, and if each receptionist issues three a shift you are near 90 a month. Returning guests as a share of arrivals is the figure that should move by month three. Direct repeat stays is the count that pays for everything else.

The dashboard shows visits, redemptions, new versus returning customers, and which regulars have gone quiet, with win-back messaging from the same screen. For a hotel, "gone quiet" means a guest who stayed twice and has not been back in eight months. That is the list worth a message a few weeks before the season you need to fill.

Then write one line on the office wall: commission avoided equals direct repeat stays, times nights per stay, times your average rate, times your effective commission rate. Compare it to 85 SAR a month. If the left side is not clearly larger by day 90, the program is not working, and no dashboard should talk you out of that conclusion.

For context on maturity, Waya runs 100+ shops across Saudi Arabia with 5,000+ cards living in wallets, rated 4.9/5 by 90 merchants, and backed by the AWS Startups program. It was built for merchants with a counter and a queue, and a front desk is a counter. Nothing in the mechanics is hospitality-specific, which is the honest reason to test it with a printed QR code and a six-week pilot before you commit anything more.