As an established tour operator or attraction with thousands—or even tens of thousands—of bookings each month, you’ve likely developed a sophisticated, strategic relationship with OTAs. For years, these platforms have played a key role in filling capacity, extending your reach, and maintaining a consistent flow of bookings, potentially accounting for 30-60% of your volume. OTAs bring the benefits of global exposure, customer reviews, and added marketing reach, making them a necessary piece of your business model.
However, there’s a hidden cost to this relationship. The more bookings you funnel through OTAs, the more you’re giving up control over your customer relationships and, ultimately, your brand. Or, put another way, you’re building a brand on rented land. For a business of your scale, this dependency poses an existential risk not just to your bottom line but to your brand’s autonomy and long-term growth.
That’s why increasing direct bookings is essential for preserving profitability and maintaining control over your guest experience. But as you push to bring more direct business, it’s equally important to ensure your booking software isn’t quietly siphoning extra fees on OTA bookings. Here’s why protecting your margins and control over your business means avoiding these unnecessary fees.
- Stand out from the crowd
- Own the customer relationship
- Futureproof your brand
- Avoid double-dipping fees
- A renewed focus on guest experience
Stand out from the crowd
When you are first starting out, OTAs can give you a lot of brand reach, especially if you are good at optimizing for each OTA’s algorithm. However, as you get bigger, diminishing returns set in.
As your business grows and handles thousands of bookings each month, you’re not just facing competition. You’re also up against the challenge of maintaining your brand’s uniqueness at scale. OTAs, while helpful early on, can make it difficult to differentiate your experience from competitors. The more established your operation, the harder it becomes to stand out when OTAs are promoting a sea of similar options. For a brand of your size, losing control over your image and messaging on these platforms means blending into the noise and competing on price alone.
Before too long, you suddenly looked just like every other experience in your category and could only compete on “price” moving forward.
Own the customer relationship
When customers book directly on your website, you also have the opportunity to delight them. They have a personal connection to your brand, not just a transaction through a faceless “OTA” platform. These relationships are what get them to tell their friends about their experience and/or keep them coming back.
This means that every direct booking becomes more valuable not just in the short term but for future upsell and retention opportunities.
With no middlemen taking a slice of the pie, you can offer personalized touches that ensure your guests come back again and again.
Many operators realize this when they try to run customer review campaigns. That’s because the OTA owns the company relationship, not you. They fully control and have the ability to turn off review request emails, usually within 3 months of an experience is complete.
Futureproof your brand
Inevitably, platform decay will sink in. If you are overly reliant on OTAs, they can keep adding more and more fees. It’s only a matter of time before those fees cut deeper into margins.
Starting to diversify and get at least a small amount of direct bookings earlier on could end up saving you hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions in marketing and advertising costs down the line. That’s because you are competing against OTAs for your own brand name in organic search social. They have widespread brand recognition and millions of dollars at their disposal. In fact, Tripadvisor spends more than $1.5 million dollars a month just on Google Ads.
Why pay more tomorrow when you can take action today?
Avoid double-dipping fees
With most OTA commissions taking a 10-30% cut right off the bat, this is already eating into your margins.
If your booking software also wants to take its own cut in the form of an “OTA or API fee” for these same bookings, this could have an impact on your margins, which could mean having to cut corners with availability or skimping on designing the optimal guest experience because you can’t afford it. Even a 2% fee on top of the OTA commission could be around $20,000 if you are processing over a million OTA bookings a year.
This turns the focus on the opportunity to use the saved fees to improve guest experience.
A renewed focus on guest experience
As a high-volume operator, managing thousands of guests means navigating a wide range of needs, expectations, and preferences. The tools you rely on should empower you to deliver personalized, exceptional experiences at scale—not hinder your ability to do so by quietly adding unnecessary OTA fees that cut into your margins and guest experience.
That’s why choosing a solution like Xola, which doesn’t charge added OTA fees, is a strategic investment in the future of your guest experience.
So, you stay one step ahead, and it gives you the freedom to reinvest in what truly matters. That’s delivering memorable, high-quality experiences that keep guests coming back.
