Pay for Advice, Pay for a Job, or Pay for Results: How a Commission Model Changes Everything

Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment. When you hire someone to help grow your business, what are you actually paying for? Are you paying for advice? Are you paying for a specific job to be done? Or are you paying for results?

Many owners assume these are the same thing. They are not. And the difference between them is, in my experience, the single biggest reason so many hotels feel let down by the agencies and consultants they hire.

After more than twenty years working in hotel revenue management, distribution, and digital marketing, I’ve watched this play out from both sides of the table (I spent over a decade in IT, Revenue Management and Digital Marketing inside Thai hotels). That experience shaped how we decided to charge. We don’t sell advice. We don’t sell a fixed list of tasks. We sell results, and we built our pricing around that one idea: if we don’t generate revenue, we don’t get paid.

The Quiet Problem With How Most Agencies Charge

Let’s be honest about how the traditional model works, because once you see it clearly, you can’t unsee it.

A typical agency or software provider charges you a fixed monthly fee. They quote a scope of work, you sign a twelve-month contract, and the invoices arrive whether your occupancy is 40% or 90%. On paper this looks reasonable. In practice it creates a quiet but serious misalignment of interest.

Think about what that fixed fee actually rewards. It rewards winning the contract and keeping it. It does not reward growing your revenue. Once the agreement is signed, the agency’s commercial incentive is simply to do enough to avoid being fired, not enough to genuinely move the needle. The work becomes maintenance. A report here, a few ad tweaks there, a monthly call to reassure you that things are ticking along. The fee stays the same regardless.

This isn’t because agency people are lazy or dishonest. Most are neither. It’s because the structure they operate within does not connect their effort to your outcome. When a provider gets paid the same whether you succeed or fail, you have hired their attendance, not their performance.

I’ve seen hotels pay a fixed retainer for years and quietly accept stagnant direct bookings because the relationship felt comfortable and the reports looked busy. Busy is not the same as effective. A stack of dashboards showing “engagement” and “impressions” tells you the agency was active. It tells you almost nothing about whether more money landed in your account.

Advice, A Job, or Results

This brings us back to the three things you might actually be buying.

When you pay for advice, you’re paying a consultant to tell you what to do. The risk sits entirely with you. If the advice is wrong, or simply never gets implemented properly, the consultant has still done what you paid for. They gave you the advice. What you did with it was your problem.

When you pay for a job, you’re paying for a defined task to be completed. Build a website. Run a set of ads for a fixed budget. Produce twelve blog posts. The provider delivers the task and the invoice is justified. But notice what’s missing: nobody is accountable for whether the task produced any commercial result. The website might convert poorly. The ads might attract the wrong guests. The job was done, the fee was paid, and your revenue may not have moved at all.

When you pay for results, everything changes. Now the provider only earns when you earn. The risk shifts off your shoulders and onto theirs. They are no longer incentivised to look busy. They are incentivised to actually grow your business, because that is the only way they get paid.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the industry sells you the first two and quietly hopes you’ll mistake them for the third.

Why We Chose to Work on Commission

When we built The Percentage Company, we made a deliberate decision that still surprises people. The vast majority of our software and services are provided on a commission-only basis. No setup fees on most of our products. No large upfront cost. We partner with you, we grow your direct revenue, and we take a small percentage of what we help generate. If we don’t sell, we don’t charge you anything at all.

People sometimes assume we do this as a marketing gimmick, a clever way to lower the barrier to signing up. It isn’t. We do it because it’s the only structure that keeps us honest and keeps us aligned with you over the long term.

Here’s the logic. If we only earn a percentage of the revenue we generate, then we are commercially obliged to do the job properly. Half-hearted work doesn’t pay our bills. Maintenance doesn’t pay our bills. The only thing that pays us is the same thing that pays you: more bookings, more direct revenue, more margin staying with the property rather than disappearing to the OTAs (online travel agents like Booking.com and Agoda, who typically take 15 to 25% commission on every reservation). Our contract doesn’t just permit us to do things properly. It forces us to.

This is also why we’re not afraid of it. Working on commission only makes sense if you’re confident in what you do and you have the experience to back it up. We’ve generated over THB 2.5 billion in revenue for our clients since 2018. We move the average property from around 13% direct booking share to over 30% within twelve months. Friendship Beach Resort in Rawai now runs at more than 80% annual occupancy with 58% of its revenue coming through direct channels. We wouldn’t put our entire income at risk on a model like this if we weren’t sure we could deliver.

The Same Boat as the Owner

There’s a phrase I come back to often when explaining this to hotel owners. We are in the same boat as you.

When your revenue goes up, ours does too. When the low season bites, as it’s biting right now across much of Thailand, our income drops alongside yours. We feel the seasons the way you feel them. That’s not a bug in our model, it’s the entire point. It means that when business is slow, we are every bit as motivated as you are to find the bookings, fill the rooms, and protect your margin. We are not sitting comfortably on a fixed retainer while you absorb the downturn alone.

A fixed-fee agency has no such pressure. Their invoice is identical in August and in May. They are insulated from your seasonality, which means they are insulated from caring about it in any meaningful commercial sense. We are not insulated from anything. We share the risk, we share the slow months, and we share the success. That shared exposure is what turns a vendor into a genuine partner.

It’s worth saying that this also shapes flexibility. Because our fee moves with your revenue, it naturally flexes with your business. Strong months cost you more in commission, but only because you earned more to begin with. Quiet months cost you less. The pricing breathes with the rhythm of your hotel rather than sitting on top of it as a fixed burden regardless of how you’re trading.

What You Actually Get

I want to be clear that commission-only does not mean light-touch. It’s the opposite. Because our income depends on your results, we deliver a genuinely full package, not a thin slice of activity.

That means software, consulting, setup, maintenance, and ongoing service, all under one roof and all aligned to the same goal. We can be your outsourced commercial engine: booking software, guest engagement, AI Analytics, revenue strategy, marketing, OTA management, content, and more. We handle the pricing, the ads, the conversion optimisation, the channel management. Some clients want powerful software they can run themselves, and we offer that too. Others want the full commercial team driving growth on their behalf. Both are available, and the commission-only option sits at the heart of the offer for those who want to pay only when they earn.

The reason we can bundle all of this into one aligned fee is precisely because we’re not charging for individual tasks. We’re not penny-pinching you for each report or each campaign. We’re charging a small percentage of the revenue we generate, which means we’ll do whatever genuinely moves that number, because that’s the only thing that pays us.

Performance Is What Keeps Us Hired

There’s a final point that I think matters more than any single statistic. We don’t lock clients into huge contracts and hope they forget to leave. We can’t afford to think that way, because our model only works if we keep performing month after month.

We are a fairly young company (founded in 2018), but our average client relationship runs to nearly three years, and one in four of our contracted clients has been with us for more than four years. That retention isn’t bought with contracts or switching costs. It’s earned with results. Performance is the only thing keeping us in the room. The moment we stop delivering, the commission dries up, and frankly we’d deserve to lose the work.

That accountability sharpens everything we do. It’s a very different feeling from the fixed-fee world, where a provider can coast on a signed agreement and a comfortable relationship. We don’t have that luxury, and we don’t want it.

So, What Are You Paying For?

Come back to the question we started with. When you hire help for your hotel, are you paying for advice, for a job, or for results?

If you’re happy paying for advice and carrying all the risk yourself, there are plenty of consultants who’ll happily oblige. If you want a specific job done and you’re comfortable being accountable for whether it works, the market is full of agencies who’ll take a fixed fee and tick the boxes. But if what you actually want is more revenue, more direct bookings, and less of your margin leaking to the OTAs, then you should be paying for results, and you should expect the people you hire to put their own income on the line to deliver them.

That’s the standard we hold ourselves to. We only win when you win. We share the slow seasons and the strong ones. And our contract obliges us to do the job properly, because if we don’t, we simply don’t get paid.

At The Percentage Company, we’d rather earn our fee from your growth than collect it from your patience. If that’s the kind of partner you’ve been looking for, we’d be glad to have a conversation about what a commission-only arrangement could look like for your property.