Every operator I work with starts in the same place. You list on Airbnb, you list on Vrbo, maybe Booking.com, and the calendar fills. The platforms are doing exactly what they were built to do. Send guests, take a cut, move on.
That works. Until it does not.
The shift happens quietly. One quarter your commission line on the P&L is a rounding error. The next quarter it is your largest controllable expense. Your guests come from someone else's app, book under someone else's brand, and disappear into someone else's database. You are managing more units than you ever have, and you have less control than you ever had.
This is what I want to unpack. Not a pitch against OTAs. They are a channel. They belong in the mix. What I want to push back on is treating them as the strategy.
"OTAs should be treated as a channel, not the strategy."
Where OTAs earn their keep
For an emerging operator, OTAs are the fastest path to visibility you will ever find. Speed, audience, friction-free inventory loading. There is no marketing budget on earth that competes with Airbnb sending you a booking the day you go live.
If you are under 20 units and trying to prove the model, lean in. The math works. The unit economics absorb the commission because you are buying demand you could not generate on your own.
Where they start to hurt
Scale changes the math. Three things compound at the same time.
Commission gets expensive in absolute dollars.
Fifteen percent of a $200 booking is one thing. Fifteen percent of a $2,400 booking, at 60 bookings a month, across 80 units, is a finance conversation. Look at your P&L. Channel cost is a real line item, and at a certain portfolio size it is large enough to justify hiring a person whose only job is to take it down.
Guest relationships sit on someone else's side of the firewall.
You do not own the email. You do not see the search query that brought them to you. You cannot follow up, re-market, or build loyalty in any meaningful way, because the platform has decided you do not need to.
Pricing flexibility narrows.
OTAs reward certain behaviors and punish others. Promotional structures, length-of-stay logic, fee design. The platform has opinions about all of it, and those opinions are not always aligned with your margin.
When you only see the booking count, none of this shows up. You have to look at what each booking actually costs you.
Rate cuts are not a strategy either
When demand softens, the reflex is to cut price. It is visible, it is fast, and it feels like you are doing something. The problem is that you almost never are.
Revenue management has a stack of levers. Length of stay. Minimum nights. Promotional windows. Booking window targeting. Cancellation policy. Channel mix. Demand stimulation through marketing. Price is the last one, not the first one.
If your problem is that not enough qualified guests are seeing the property, dropping the rate does not fix that. It just means the same shortage of demand books at a worse margin. You lost twice. You lost the rate, and you still did not solve the underlying issue.
I tell our team this constantly. The question is never "should we lower the price." The question is "what is actually broken." Sometimes the answer is price. More often it is positioning, distribution, or the gap between what marketing is doing and what revenue management is doing.
The marketing-and-revenue gap
This is the disconnect I see in almost every operator we onboard.
Marketing is running broad campaigns. Branded search, social, occasional paid placement. Generic awareness. Revenue management is reacting to weak periods by discounting. Neither team can see what the other is doing, and neither team is solving for the same number.
The shift, when it works, looks like this. Marketing knows exactly which properties and which date ranges need help. Campaigns get pointed at gaps, not at general awareness. Revenue management protects the rate, because demand is being generated against the right inventory at the right time. RevPAR moves up. Margin holds.
This is not a tooling problem. It is an org problem. The two functions have to be talking, and they almost never are.
Most operators cannot tell you where their bookings come from
Ask an operator at 50 units to break down last month's bookings by channel, and most of the time you get a total number. Maybe a rough split. Almost never a clean view of how the mix has moved over the last six quarters, or what each channel is contributing per unit.
That is the part that quietly kills the strategy conversation. You cannot decide where to invest marketing dollars if you cannot tell what each channel is already doing for you. You cannot price for direct if you do not know what direct is worth. You cannot defend a commission renegotiation if you cannot show the platform what you bring to the table.
Channel attribution is not exotic. It is table stakes. And it is missing more often than not.
When to build the direct strategy
I get this question constantly. "At what unit count do I start investing in direct?"
It is the wrong question. It is not about unit count. It is about whether you are ready.
Three conditions matter.
- 01You have enough inventory that a guest landing on your site has real options. If you have eight cabins in one market, a direct site is a brochure. If you have 40, it is a search experience.
- 02You have a brand worth engaging with directly. A name, a point of view, a reason a guest would want to come back to you instead of the next listing.
- 03The unit economics make the commission savings material. If you are clearing $25 per booking on net margin, saving $30 in commission changes the business. If you are clearing $400, it is a nice-to-have.
The range I see in practice is somewhere between 20 and 50 units. But the threshold is operational readiness, not a headcount on a spreadsheet.
When you do build it, the payoff is real. Margin comes back, because the commission stops. Data comes back, because you finally see how guests find you, what they look at, where they drop off. Control comes back, because pricing, experience, and brand are all under your roof.
What direct booking data actually unlocks
This is the piece most operators underestimate.
When you book through Airbnb, you get a name, a stay, a payout. When you book direct, you get the full picture. What city the guest searched from. Which listings they compared. What page they bounced on. What email they opened. Whether they came back six weeks later and booked a different property.
That data is not interesting because it is data. It is interesting because it lets you make decisions on evidence instead of feel. Marketing investment becomes a math problem. Pricing decisions get sharper. You stop guessing about demand and start measuring it.
The actual goal
I am not telling you to leave the OTAs. I am telling you to stop letting them be the whole strategy.
OTAs are a distribution channel. They belong in the mix. The operators who win at scale are the ones who use OTAs deliberately, build direct deliberately, and treat the relationship between the two as something they manage instead of something that happens to them.
The shift is from platform dependence to demand control. That is the only version of this business that compounds.
Adapted from a webinar appearance with BookingsCloud, April 2026.