How Do You Actually Know Who’s Bringing What?
One of the simplest things about managing OTA channels is attribution. Even when rates are being leaked by a source that shouldn’t be distributing them, the revenue at least aligns with the channel. The numbers reconcile. The reporting is clean.
That same clarity does not exist with direct channel bookings. For many Revenue Managers, this creates an understandable gravitational pull towards OTAs – what might be called the OTA mixing desk: channels managed like volume sliders, adjusted up and down based on inventory and demand.
That approach works – until it doesn’t. When market demand drops, the hotel’s reliance on OTAs to fill rooms becomes a liability rather than a strategy. COVID-19 was the extreme example, but the same exposure exists whenever a new competitor opens nearby or a key source market contracts. An all-in OTA approach carries persistent risk that is easy to overlook when occupancy is healthy.
The Budget Paradox
Direct booking campaigns require budget. That much is obvious. What is less obvious – and would seem extraordinary to anyone outside hospitality – is that a hotel paying €100,000 or more in annual OTA commissions often struggles to allocate even a fraction of that amount to its own direct campaigns.
The reason is structural. After more than twenty years of OTA distribution, commission payments are embedded in hotel budgets as a fixed cost of doing business. They come with a guarantee of revenue. Direct campaigns, by contrast, require upfront investment with less certain returns – at least under the current measurement framework.
This creates a cycle that is difficult to break. Hotels under-invest in direct channels because the returns are hard to quantify, and the returns remain hard to quantify because the tracking infrastructure is inadequate. The OTA share grows not because OTAs are necessarily better at reaching guests, but because the hotel has no reliable way of proving that its own campaigns are working.
The Discounting Escalation
Even hotels that do invest in direct campaigns face an increasingly difficult competitive landscape. What worked five years ago no longer resonates.
Complimentary breakfast as a direct booking incentive has lost its edge. A 15% discount off the best available rate – once a credible offer – now needs to be closer to 30% just to maintain price competitiveness against OTAs. The reason is that OTAs have introduced their own loyalty programmes, member-only pricing, and bundled deals that systematically undercut the direct channel.
Competing on room-only rate is a race to the bottom. The opportunity lies in offering something an OTA structurally cannot.
Hotels that build unique, bookable packages – experiences, inclusions, flexible terms that only exist on the direct channel – can sidestep the rate war entirely. OTAs operate at a scale that makes it impractical for them to respond to what any single property is doing. That asymmetry is the hotel’s advantage, but only if the campaign setup is capable of surfacing those offers effectively.
Boilerplate Campaigns and Missed Opportunities
This is where the gap between what hotels need and what many campaign providers deliver becomes most visible.
Because digital revenue management requires hands-on attention, the campaigns that hotels typically find themselves enrolled in rely on the lowest-effort setup: boilerplate ad copy dropped into templates, generic messaging that does nothing to communicate the property’s unique offer. The result is advertising that functions as a shortcut back to the hotel website rather than a persuasive case for booking direct.
There is a simple way to assess this. Google’s Ads Transparency Centre (adstransparency.google.com) allows anyone to view the advertisements running for any brand. Hotels should review their own ads and ask a straightforward question: do these advertisements reflect the offers currently in the booking engine and on the hotel’s website? If the answer is no – if the ads are generic text that could apply to any property – then the campaign is not doing its job.
From Attribution Guesswork to Reservation-Level Tracking
The measurement challenges facing digital advertising are well documented – we explored them in detail in our previous article, Why Hotel Paid Campaigns Consistently Underperform. The core issue remains: standard tracking configurations rely on modelled attribution rather than verified booking data.
For Revenue Managers, the distinction matters enormously. Revenue decisions based on accurate, quantitative data will always outperform those based on estimates. When digital campaigns are tracked through to specific reservation data, a different level of insight becomes available: when a particular source market books, when to time promotions to capture that segment more effectively, what incentives drive longer stays.
That represents a fundamentally different kind of reporting from the standard output of keyword, campaign, and revenue figures – figures that, under current attribution models, may reflect what the ad network estimated happened rather than what actually did.
Key Considerations
OTA attribution is straightforward; direct channel attribution is not. That gap in visibility is what keeps many hotels over-invested in OTA distribution and under-invested in direct campaigns.
The budget paradox – paying six figures in OTA commissions while struggling to fund direct campaigns – is a structural problem that better measurement can help resolve.
Rate-based competition with OTAs is a losing strategy. Unique, direct-only packages bypass the rate war entirely and exploit a structural weakness in how OTAs operate.
Generic, templated campaign copy wastes budget. Hotels should review their own ads in the Google Ads Transparency Centre and ask whether those ads reflect what the property actually offers.
Reservation-level tracking – where every booking maps to a specific campaign action – transforms digital reporting from estimation into evidence.
How Internet Affected Works with Hotels
We work with hotels to build direct channel strategies grounded in verified booking data, not modelled attribution. From campaign structure and tracking setup to ongoing management at the individual property level, our approach is designed to give Revenue Managers the clarity they need to make confident investment decisions.
If the patterns described in this article look familiar, we’re happy to conduct a no-obligation review of your current campaign setup and identify where improvements can be made.
Get in touch to find out how we can help your hotel.
About the author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels and luxury brands for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides digital revenue services tailored to the individual characters of hotels; a complete range of services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
