Hotels are a profit driver for port agencies. Are you treating them like one?
By Henry Popiolek · Published 21 May 2026
Hotels are a crucial profit driver for port agencies. With husbandry and agency fees under constant downward pressure, what you earn on hotel bookings has quietly become one of the most important margin lines on the P&L. And one of the least managed.
If hotel bookings were a procurement category at your agency, someone would own it. There would be a quarterly review, a list of preferred suppliers under active negotiation, a number on a dashboard somewhere.
For most agencies, none of that happens. Hotel bookings are handled by husbandry teams who have ten other things to do, against rebate agreements that were good when they were signed and haven't been seriously revisited since. Nobody is quite sure how much money is on the table because nobody is measuring it.
Why hotels slip through the cracks
Four reasons.
It's offline. Bookings happen over email and WhatsApp. Invoices arrive PDF by PDF from hotel back offices. The data lives in inboxes, not systems. Pulling a single view of spend and earnings across your ports needs someone to do it by hand, and that someone doesn't exist.
It's fragmented. Every port has its own hotels, its own relationships, its own rebate terms. There isn't one contract to renegotiate, there are forty, most of them informal.
Renegotiation is hard work. Even if you knew which rebates weren't competitive, fixing it means going hotel by hotel, then retraining your bookers, then checking they're actually doing it differently. Months of work for a return you can't size up front.
It's nobody's job. Husbandry handles bookings. Finance pays invoices. Commercial owns the client. Hotel strategy sits in the gap between them, and gaps don't get audited.
On top of all that, there's a cultural piece. Every MD we speak to who has a negotiated rebate believes they have the best deal in their port. That can't be true, and in our experience usually isn't. But if you already think you're winning, why would you put resource into checking?
The supply side has changed, and most agencies haven't noticed
Five or ten years ago, the "we always use this hotel" approach made sense. In most ports, one or two hotels actually understood seafarers. They handled full board with no alcohol, they didn't blink at last-minute date changes, they knew how to bill an agency rather than a card. Everyone else was a headache.
That's not the market anymore. Across the 75+ countries we operate in on Staze, we work with tens of thousands of hotels that handle crew changes properly, in every major port and most of the minor ones. The hotel that used to be your only sensible option in port X probably has five or ten direct competitors now, all capable of doing the job.
This matters because the entire reason your default hotel can charge what it charges is the assumption that switching is hard. Five years ago, switching genuinely was hard. You'd have to vet the new hotel, negotiate a billing account, train your team on a new contact, manage the risk of something going wrong with the first booking. Months of work, real downside.
Today, on Staze, switching is a search. The vetting is done. The billing is automated. Your team books the new hotel the same way they book the old one. Your default hotel's pricing leverage was built on a switching cost that no longer exists, but they're still pricing as if it does, because nobody's tested them.
What a markup strategy actually looks like
The other shift worth understanding: a "markup strategy" used to be aspirational. You can't have a strategy across forty bilateral hotel agreements in fragmented ports. The most you can have is forty separate deals, each negotiated and managed in isolation.
Once execution sits on one system, a strategy becomes something you can actually implement and change. The real options:
Flat markup per booking. Simplest. Ten percent on everything, everywhere. Easy to explain internally, easy to defend to clients, predictable for forecasting.
Markup varied by port. Where you have local market power, earn more. Where you're competing harder, earn less. Reflects the reality that not all ports are equal.
Markup varied by client. Strategic clients get tighter pricing, transactional ones get standard. Lets you use hotel margin as a relationship lever rather than a fixed line.
Pass-through. Bill the client the hotel rate, earn through agency fees instead. Useful where the client demands transparency or where you're competing on total cost.
Opportunistic. When you find a cheaper hotel that works, split the saving with the client. They pay less than they would have. You earn more in absolute terms than your rebate would have given you. The hotel still gets the volume. Everyone is better off than under the old equilibrium.
These aren't theoretical. They're settings. You can pick one, try it, measure it, evolve it over time.
What this means for your P&L
The combination of the two shifts, more capable hotels in every port plus actual ability to implement a strategy, is why hotel margin matters more now than it did three years ago.
Before, even if you knew you were leaving money on the table, the cost of doing something about it was higher than the upside. So the rational move was to leave it alone. That maths has flipped. The supply is there. The execution is there. The only thing missing is the decision.
If hotels are one of your most important margin lines, and for most port agencies they are, the question isn't whether to manage them more actively. It's why you haven't yet.
We offer a free benchmarking of your hotel spend. Contact Staze to get started and see what you could be earning with a different markup strategy.
