Recouping control in an OTA-dominated world: a guide for hotels
Angie Elsley
Angie Elsley is Open Partners' Growth Director, with over 30 years' experience in scaling ambitious brands.
If you run a hotel, you’ve probably felt it: the pull between convenience and control. Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) make it easy to fill rooms fast, but every booking comes at a cost. Between 15-25% of your revenue vanishes in commission, along with access to the guest data that fuels long-term loyalty. What starts as a shortcut to visibility often ends as a dependency that limits growth.
The landscape is shifting fast. AI, automation and new discovery platforms are rewriting how travellers find and book stays. That shift is your opening. With the right future-focused strategy, smart use of AI and a partner built for what’s next, hotels can move from reliance to resilience, driving more direct bookings, building stronger brands and owning the customer journey again.
At Open Partners, we help hospitality brands do exactly that. By integrating media, data and creative, we use technology to work smarter, move faster and deliver better outcomes. In a world dominated by OTAs, we put control back where it belongs, with you.
Why OTAs are costing hotels more than they think
For many hotels, OTAs started as an easy route to growth. They offer reach, convenience and a steady stream of bookings. But behind the glossy promise lies a system that quietly eats into your margins and limits your brand’s potential.
Most major OTAs take a chunk of commission on every booking. That may sound manageable at first, but for a hotel operating on tight margins, it can be the difference between profit and pressure. Rate parity clauses make things even harder. These agreements stop you from offering lower prices on your own site, keeping you locked into the OTA’s terms and pricing model.
Then there’s data. When a guest books through an OTA, the platform owns the customer information, not you. That means no direct communication, no chance to build loyalty and no insight into who your most valuable guests are. Over time, this creates a dependency that limits your ability to grow sustainably.
OTAs also shape how your brand appears in search results. Their advertising budgets dominate paid and organic rankings, pushing your website further down the page. The result is that your hotel risks becoming just another name in a long list, rather than a destination guests choose for its unique experience or story.
And now, that dominance extends into AI search. As travellers begin to use generative and conversational AI to plan trips, OTAs are already positioning themselves to appear first. Their vast content libraries and SEO authority make them hard to outrank, even in emerging search models. Yet there is hope. AI search is still a level playing field. With the right strategy and data-led optimisation, even smaller, independent brands can compete and win visibility against the biggest aggregators.
In the UK and across Europe, regulators are beginning to tighten rules around digital marketplaces. That shift presents an opportunity for hotels to reassess how they distribute and market themselves. It’s a chance to step back from costly channels and invest in strategies that deliver long-term value instead of short-term volume.
The hidden impact on brand trust and awareness
OTAs may help fill rooms quickly, but they can also blur what makes your hotel unique. When your property appears beside dozens of others in a list, the focus shifts from experience to price. Guests compare rates rather than value, which pulls your brand into a race to the bottom. Over time, this can weaken your brand perception and make it harder to stand out for quality, service or story.
Relying on OTAs also means losing direct control over how your brand is presented. Listings are templated, descriptions are generic and photography often competes for attention among similar properties. That uniformity removes your ability to tell a distinctive story or build emotional connection with your audience.
Hotels that invest in their own storytelling and loyalty strategies see stronger long-term results. When guests book directly, they engage with your brand from the start. That gives you the chance to communicate your values, share your story and create the kind of experience that turns one stay into many.
Owning your guest data is a vital part of this. It allows you to personalise marketing, tailor offers and build meaningful relationships that OTAs cannot replicate. It also enables you to cross-sell services, drive repeat bookings and strengthen reputation through consistent guest experience.
A small hotel that builds a strong brand narrative, backed by smart data use, can often outperform a larger chain that relies too heavily on intermediaries. In a crowded digital marketplace, trust and familiarity are what drive direct bookings, not just convenience or cost.
Why hotels need an AI-forward marketing strategy
The travel landscape is changing fast. Guests now discover, compare and book hotels across a mix of traditional search, social media and AI-driven recommendation tools. To compete, hotels need more than visibility. They need the intelligence and agility to predict demand, personalise offers and communicate with guests in real time.
An AI-forward marketing strategy gives hotels that edge. Using predictive analytics, machine learning and automation, AI can uncover patterns in booking behaviour and customer preferences that human analysis alone would miss. This helps you anticipate demand, refine pricing and deliver tailored experiences that keep guests returning.
AI also enables smarter use of media. Automation can optimise PPC campaigns to target the right audience at the right time, reducing wasted spend and lowering cost per acquisition. For creative teams, generative AI can help produce content that resonates with specific traveller segments, while freeing time for strategy and storytelling.
In customer relationship management, AI turns guest data into a powerful loyalty tool. Automated workflows can nurture leads, send personalised offers and re-engage past guests with tailored communications. This level of personalisation builds a stronger connection between your brand and your audience, while keeping control firmly in your hands.
As AI search and voice discovery continue to grow, hotels must also ensure they appear in these emerging spaces. Structured data, optimised content and local SEO can help your brand surface in conversational AI responses, ensuring guests find you directly rather than through an OTA listing.
With the right approach, AI is not a replacement for human creativity. It is an enabler. Combined with the expertise of a partner who understands how to integrate data, media and creative, it can transform how you attract, convert and retain guests.
How to recoup control and grow direct bookings
To reduce OTA dependence, hotels need more than short-term tactics. They need a future-proofed marketing strategy built around three interconnected pillars: media, data and creative. Together, these form the foundation for long-term growth, improved efficiency and renewed brand control.
Media: reaching guests where they are now
AI search, social platforms and programmatic advertising have changed how travellers discover hotels. By using AI-driven media planning and automation in PPC, hotels can reach customers in the moments that matter most. Automation reduces wasted spend and improves cost efficiency, while precision targeting ensures every impression works harder. From paid search to social media, your media strategy must be designed for scalability, sustainability and speed.
Data: turning insight into intelligence
Data is the key to owning the customer relationship. By consolidating data from multiple sources and applying AI analytics, hotels can uncover patterns in booking behaviour, guest preferences and market trends. This enables hyper-tailored campaigns that speak directly to individual interests and motivations. With real-time insight, you can predict demand, personalise offers and deliver the kind of relevance that OTAs cannot replicate.
Creative: the strongest lever for ROI
Creative is what transforms visibility into loyalty. It shapes perception, builds trust and drives engagement. Using AI tools, you can scale personalised creative content that resonates with different audiences without sacrificing quality or authenticity. Content-led advertising, from immersive storytelling to user-generated visuals, helps your hotel stand out and connect emotionally with travellers who are overwhelmed by choice.
When media, data and creative work together, supported by the scalability and sustainability of AI, hotels can recoup losses, grow market share and reverse diminishing returns in advertising. This integrated approach doesn’t just drive direct bookings. It builds a brand that customers recognise, trust and choose over any OTA listing.
The Open Partners advantage
As experts in marketing in hospitality and leisure, we know that the right strategies can empower brands to regain independence from aggregators while delivering meaningful business growth and digital transformation.
How do we know? Because we’ve done it. For one of the UK’s leading pub and hotel chains, our integrated approach delivered +5.5 million new customers, generated £178 million in marketing-driven revenue and increased marketing investment efficiency by seven times, all while cutting the cost per conversion by -40%. For a multinational cinema chain, we drove a +53% increase in UK EBITDA and a +20% uplift across Germany, Italy and Denmark, reducing both cost per acquisition and cost per conversion by half.
We understand the hospitality and leisure markets, the seasonality, the competition and the constant need to keep occupancy and engagement high. That’s why the brands we partner with trust us to deliver measurable, transformational growth.
At Open Partners, we don’t just run campaigns. We integrate media, data and creative to create systems that scale and perform. Media connects you to the right people, powered by automation and AI. Data turns customer insight into precise, predictive action. Creative captures attention and builds trust, the strongest lever of ROI in hospitality marketing.
This is how we help hotels and leisure brands reclaim control, reduce reliance on third-party platforms and grow stronger, more sustainable direct revenue streams.
If you’re ready to build a future where your brand owns the relationship, not the platform, Open Partners will help you get there. Let’s go next.
