Who owns the customer data: booking platforms

Before you sign up to a booking marketplace, it's worth asking the blunt question up front: who owns the customer data once someone books through it? The honest answer, for most platforms, is that you don't, not fully, and that changes what you should build on your own website to make up the gap.

📋 What a marketplace actually gives you

Platforms like the big booking marketplaces for gyms, clinics and studios do one genuinely useful thing: they put you in front of people who've never heard of you. Someone searching for a physio appointment or a gym class nearby finds you on the platform, books, pays, and shows up. That's real customer acquisition, and for a new business with no search visibility of its own, it can be worth the fee.

The trade-off is what happens after that first booking. The platform usually holds the email address, the phone number, the booking history and the payment details. You get a name and a time slot. You don't get a mailing list you can email directly, you don't get to run your own loyalty offers through that contact, and in most cases you can't even see which of your regulars came through the marketplace without digging through reports the platform controls.

💷 The commission is the visible cost, not the only one

Commission rates on booking marketplaces typically sit between 10% and 20% per transaction, sometimes more once payment processing is added in. On a gym class or physio session priced at £30 to £50, that's £3 to £10 gone before you've paid for the room, the practitioner's time or anything else.

That's the cost most business owners already know about. The less visible one is what happens to repeat business. If the platform owns the customer relationship, it can (and often does) market your own clients back to your competitors. A client who loved their first session with you might get a push notification next month suggesting a different gym or clinic nearby, because the platform's job is to keep people booking through the platform, not through you specifically.

🏷️ What your own website needs to claw this back

None of this means marketplaces are always wrong. It means they work best as a top-of-funnel tool, not your only booking channel. The businesses that do well treat the marketplace as a way to meet new people, then use their own website to turn them into direct, commission-free regulars.

That requires a few specific things on your site, not just a "book now" button:

• A booking widget on your own domain that's as easy to use as the marketplace one, so there's no reason for a returning client to go back to the app.
• A simple way to capture email and phone details at the point of booking, so you own that contact the moment someone books direct.
• A small incentive for booking direct instead of through the marketplace, a modest discount or an extra perk, clearly stated so clients understand the choice.
• Booking confirmation emails sent from your own domain, carrying your branding, not the marketplace's.

This is a bigger job than slotting in an embed code. A basic booking widget install is an afternoon's work. Building the data capture, the email automation and the incentive flow properly is closer to a proper booking integration project, something worth planning rather than bolting on.

🔁 Making the two work together

The practical approach for most independent gyms, studios and clinics isn't "marketplace or website", it's both, with a plan for moving people from one to the other. Keep the marketplace listing for discovery. Use your own website for everyone who's already visited once. Every email you send from your own system, every loyalty offer, every rebooking prompt, is a chance to build a relationship the marketplace can't see or interrupt.

Track the split. If 80% of your bookings are coming through a marketplace a year after opening, that's not a visibility problem any more, it's a website problem: your own booking page isn't doing its job of converting first-time clients into direct ones.

🧭 The takeaway

Marketplaces are a fair deal for new customer acquisition and a poor deal for keeping clients long term, because the data and the relationship sit with the platform, not with you. The fix isn't to quit the marketplace, it's to make sure your own website gives returning clients every reason to book direct: a widget that works, a reason to switch, and a system that captures their details the moment they do. A straightforward booking setup, built once and left to run, usually costs far less over a year than the commission on the clients you never brought back in-house.