The frustration is consistent. Hotel operators in every forum, every LinkedIn thread, every hospitality conference side conversation come back to the same number: fifteen to twenty-five percent. The OTA commission. The slice that leaves on every booking that did not come direct.
The replies are always the same too. Build your direct booking engine. Run a loyalty programme. Offer rate advantages. Capture the email at checkout and remarket to the guest.
Good advice. Correct advice. And it consistently misses the structural reason why it does not work as well as it should.
The OTA does not give you the guest real contact details. In many cases it gives you a virtual credit card and an anonymised email. The guest who stayed in October, the one who left a five-star review and said they would be back, is not in your database. They are in Booking.com database. You have a room-block record and a checkout folio. You do not have a person.
So when the direct booking strategy is built, it is built on a hollow foundation. The email capture at checkout captures the people who stayed direct. The loyalty programme rewards the people already in the system. The OTA guests, who are often the majority of the hotel volume, remain strangers. They are the guests the house served but never actually knew.
This is not a booking engine problem. It is not a loyalty programme problem. It is a guest identity problem.
The EU decision to ban rate parity clauses changed the economics. Hotels can now legally offer lower rates to direct bookers and members than to OTA customers. The incentive to convert is stronger than it has ever been. But the mechanism to identify who to convert, to know that the guest arriving today is the guest who booked through an OTA six months ago, is still missing for most independent properties.
Resolving that identity, connecting the OTA record to the direct booking record to the POS spend to the front desk note, is what makes a direct booking strategy work. Not as a campaign. As infrastructure.
When the house knows who its guests are across every channel they came through, the conversation about OTA dependency changes. It becomes a choice rather than a dependency. You know who to invite back direct. You know who has stayed four times through a channel and is ready for membership. You know who you are dealing with.
The commission conversation is really an identity conversation. It just rarely gets described that way.
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