For inns, B&Bs and small hotels

The guest reading your lobby board already found you once, already chose you, and is standing in your building. They are the cheapest direct booking you will ever get — and for most independents, the only place that conversation reliably happens is the front desk, which is busy.

This is what the lobby pack puts on the wall, the revenue evidence behind each board, and the two things a signage pitch would normally promise you that we could not stand behind.

Watch the lobby reel Book 15 minutes

The room

Three jobs, one screen.

A lobby is the one room in this whole product line where the audience is a captive, paying, named guest. That changes what the board is for.

Answer the desk before it is asked. Wi-Fi, breakfast hours, checkout, when the shuttle next runs, where to park. Every one of these answered on the wall is a question your one person on duty at 7am does not have to stop and answer.
Welcome the party by name. A wedding block, a reunion, a cycling club. The board that says WELCOME CASCADE CYCLING CLUB when they walk in is doing something a printed sign cannot, and something guests photograph.
Give them a reason to come back — and a way to book it. What is on in the valley next month, what the seasons look like here, and the direct line or site to book it through. This is the job with the money behind it.

Note the missing job: this board does not try to sell the guest anything during their stay. Upsell screens are a real category and we are not one of them.

The evidence

Three levers worth a board each.

Three, not five. Two claims that belong in a pitch like this one are missing on purpose, and they are named at the bottom of this section. Sources at the foot of the page.

$40–50Commission on a single $200 room night

The guest in your lobby already cost you a commission once

Independent properties typically pay 15–30% to the online travel agencies, so a $200 room gives up $40–50 before anyone makes a bed. Independents ran about 36.6% direct in 2025 — the other two thirds arrived with that attached. A board in the lobby is aimed at the one audience that has already been acquired: it costs nothing to reach them again, and the ask is simply "next time, book with us."

A $200 room night booked through an OTA−$40–50
The same guest, booking direct next time−$0
Median cost per direct booking, boutique portfolios9%
Cancellation rate: OTA vs direct21.8% vs 10.6%

The cancellation gap is the part people forget: a direct booking is not only cheaper, it is roughly half as likely to evaporate.

WelcomeGuest info
+1.42%RevPAR per one-point review score, Cornell

Your review score is a price, and small frictions set it

Cornell's analysis of more than 31,000 monthly observations found that a one-point rise in a hotel's 100-point reputation index is worth up to +0.89% ADR, +0.54% occupancy and +1.42% RevPAR — and that the effect carries across every channel, online and off. Reviews are made of small things: not knowing the Wi-Fi password, missing breakfast by ten minutes, standing at a desk waiting to ask about the shuttle. A board that removes those is doing revenue work, and it can also ask for the review at the only moment a guest is both happy and standing still.

Guest infoToday at the innShuttle
$50–200To acquire one new guest through paid channels

A reason to return is cheaper than a reason to discover

New guest acquisition through paid channels runs roughly $50–200 a booking, while a returning guest who books direct costs close to nothing. What a small inn has that a chain does not is a place — the valley in October, the festival in July, the thing worth driving back for. A lobby board is where that gets said to someone who has just spent two days deciding they like it here.

Inn eventsDiningToday at the inn

The two we left out. A pitch like this normally also claims that a lobby screen cuts front-desk interruptions by some percentage, and that concierge-style local recommendations lift guest spend. Both are plausible and neither is something we found real evidence for — what exists is vendor assertion. We think both effects are real; we are not going to put a number on them and pretend it came from somewhere.

The part nobody else has

The one pack that real properties already run.

Every other demo in the showroom is a sample room we built to show you. The lobby pack came first and is in use, which changes its posture in a way worth explaining, because it is the posture your property would inherit.

Demo mode here is opt-in and fails closed. On the other packs, demo is on by default and you switch it off when you go live. On this one it is the reverse: the public reel only serves a property whose demo flag is affirmatively true. A property that has typed in its own name is off the marketing reel automatically, and could never have been on it by accident. Your guests' arrivals are not marketing collateral.

Party welcomes are typed, not fetched. There is no property-management-system integration, so the board cannot pull an arrivals list — which means it also cannot leak one. A name goes up because someone at your desk decided it should.

Three of the actual boards, rendered from the live reel:

The fine print that matters

What it refuses to do.

No PMS, no arrivals feed, no room numbers. A guest's name appears only because your staff typed it, and a room number never appears at all. The board has no route to your booking system, which is also why it cannot break when that system does.
A named party is your call, every time. Some guests love it; some are travelling privately and would not. The board makes that a decision rather than a default.
Nothing perishable that lies. Events expire on their date, the shuttle board runs off your own timetable, and holiday hours drop the day after.
No in-stay upsell. There is no board here that tries to sell a guest a spa treatment while they wait for their key. It is not what a small inn's lobby is for, and it is the fastest way to make a screen feel like an advert.

Sources

Where the numbers come from.

Commission rates vary by contract, market and rate plan; the $40–50 figure is arithmetic on a $200 room at published independent rates, not a quoted study. Cornell's figures are from midscale, upscale and luxury properties in eleven metropolitan markets — a valley inn is not that sample, and the direction is more transferable than the magnitude.

Try it on your own wall

The one-check-in test.

Put the lobby reel on a screen behind your desk — a smart TV's browser or an inexpensive streaming stick is plenty (the screens guide walks through it). It costs nothing to try. Run it through one afternoon of arrivals and watch whether anybody mentions it. If you like what you see, book fifteen minutes and we'll build it for your property — your breakfast hours, your shuttle, your name on the wall.

Watch the lobby reel Book 15 minutes Send guests to your neighbours Every other room

The reel airs a made-up property, the Valley Lodge (Sample), with sample content — and it only airs at all because that fictional property has demo mode switched on.