40×+ ROAS Sustained Over a Year: How a Luxury Hotel Chain Built Direct Bookings and Reduced OTA Dependency

We work with Ashley, a leading multi-property hotel group— six hotels across Central Jakarta's most active commercial corridors: Sabang, Tanah Abang, Tang Menteng, Tugu Tani, Wahid Hasyim, and the newly launched NewAir Menteng. When the partnership began, the group had no way to predict revenue. Every month depended on whatever the OTAs sent through — and the OTAs are volatile, expensive, and outside your control. Marketing was a cost line nobody could defend.

We built a booking channel the group owns. It starts with knowing who actually stays at each property — a corporate traveller in Tanah Abang and a family in Menteng are not the same guest — then a campaign built per property, paid and organic working together, and every booking tracked end to end to the campaign that earned it. In the peak month the engine hit >62× blended ROAS, direct-booking revenue grew 4×, organic impressions rose 84% year over year, and revenue stopped being a monthly mystery — it became something Ashley can forecast. This engagement comes apart into two disciplines of the same engine: a multi-property paid engine that captures demand across Meta and Google, and a Funnel & CRO discipline that converts that demand into a direct booking the group owns, not an OTA reservation.

Meet Ashley.

Ashley operates six hotels across Central Jakarta's most commercially active corridors — Sabang, Tanah Abang, Tang Menteng, Tugu Tani, Wahid Hasyim, and the newly launched NewAir Menteng. The brand is the same; the guests are not. Each location draws a completely different traveller — business trips, family weekends, regional shoppers, international visitors — each with their own buying behaviour, search patterns, and reasons to book.

Ashley was acquiring all of them the same way — the same campaigns, the same messaging, the same landing pages, for six different markets. And Jakarta's mid-scale hotel market is dominated by OTAs taking 15–25% commission on every room. There was no competitive direct channel and no way to know which property was actually earning the bookings that weren't already taxed by a platform. The opportunity was to build a channel the group owns: the right guest for each property, converted to a direct booking, with revenue finally tied to the campaign that earned it.

The engine, in one view — know the guest, build per property, track to revenue.

The contrarian move: we didn't start with "which channel?" We started with who actually stays at each property — because once you know that, everything downstream gets obvious: the channels, the creative, the offer, and what counts as a booking worth measuring.

1. Layer 1 · Understand — who actually stays at each property. Before a single ad, we mapped the real guest mix at all six hotels — business trips, family stays, regional shoppers, international visitors — through booking data, interviews, and each hotel's front-of-house team.
2. Layer 2 · Differentiate — a campaign per property, not one playbook. Six hotels, six guests, six approaches — distinct audiences, creative, offers, and landing pages, because the corporate traveller in Tanah Abang and the weekend family in Menteng needed completely different conversations.
3. Layer 3 · Launch — a new property into a unique angle. NewAir Menteng opened with no audience and no track record. We launched it on an angle no other Jakarta family hotel was claiming — and it became the highest-returning campaign in the account.
4. Layer 4 · Track — every booking tied to revenue. Direct bookings tracked end to end, paid and organic together, so revenue is finally traceable to the campaign that earned it — predictable month after month, and defensible to leadership.

Knowing who stays where is what made everything downstream obvious — and what turned marketing from an undefendable cost line into predictable revenue.