Why we charge 5%

How the money moves

When you book a ₹5,000 room here, you pay ₹5,000. Not ₹5,000 plus a convenience fee, not ₹5,000 plus taxes-and-charges that appear at the last step. Five thousand rupees.

We collect that payment, keep ₹250 — five percent — and transfer ₹4,750 to the property a few days after you check out. We raise a GST invoice to the property for our ₹250, which they can claim input credit on. That is the entire transaction. There is no second revenue stream.

Why a big commission costs you, not just the hotel

It is tempting to think a platform's commission is the hotel's problem. It isn't, and the reason is simple arithmetic.

A property has a number in mind: what it needs to clear per room, per night, to cover staff, laundry, electricity, maintenance and the loan on the building. Call it ₹4,000. If a platform takes 20%, the property has to list at ₹5,000 to clear ₹4,000. If a platform takes 5%, it can list at ₹4,210 and clear the same amount.

Then the 20% platform adds a booking fee on your side. So the same room, with the same bed and the same breakfast, reaches you at ₹5,400 in one place and ₹4,210 in the other. Nothing about the room changed. Only the toll on the way to it did.

What we do with 5%

Five percent has to cover everything, so we have been deliberate about what "everything" is:

• Payment processing. Card and UPI charges are real and unavoidable.
• Hosting and engineering. Search, the booking engine, the rate calendar, the payout ledger.
• Support. Actual humans, answering actual emails, within a business day.
• Moderation. Checking every listing before it goes live and every review before it publishes.

What it does not cover is a large advertising budget bidding against our own partners' names, or a sales team negotiating a different rate with every hotel. Those costs are what a 20% commission mostly pays for, and we would rather not have them.

So what is the catch?

The honest answer: we are smaller. We have fewer properties than the incumbents, and there are cities where we have nothing to show you yet. If breadth of inventory is what you need above all else, we may not be the right place today.

What we can promise is that the price you see is the price you pay, that every review comes from someone who actually stayed, and that the property you booked is keeping 95% of your money rather than 80%.

Run a property? See what you would keep.