OTAs keep levelling up. Is your direct strategy keeping pace?

I was in Japan recently for one of the major OTA conferences, and I came home with a very different read on the competitive landscape than I expected. The conversation in our industry is usually about commissions or the struggles operators face with information being shared.

That’s not what I want to talk about here. It’s how fast OTAs are taking market share and how much smarter they’re getting at doing it. If small operators are still thinking about OTAs the way they did two years ago, they’re already behind.

OTAs are winning because they’re becoming easier to book through than almost anything else, including, in a lot of cases, your own website. The investment going into checkout flow, saved payment details, one-tap rebooking and app-based itinerary management is relentless. Every friction point a guest might hit on the way to confirming a booking is being engineered out.

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They’re becoming the path of least resistance for booking anything travel-related, and every year that gap between ‘easiest way to book’ and ‘how my website works’ widens if we’re not actively closing it. If your direct booking flow requires more taps, more thinking or more waiting than the OTA app on a guest’s phone, you are losing that guest to convenience, not price.

None of this means walking away from OTAs. If anything, the opposite. The billboard effect is real and it’s not going anywhere: guests discover you on an OTA, then go searching for your name directly to check reviews, look at your website or see if there’s a better deal booking direct. That behaviour hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that OTAs are getting better and better at closing the loop and keeping their customers in their own ecosystem.

So the job isn’t to compete with OTA visibility. It’s to make sure that when a guest does go looking for you directly, off the back of the billboard effect, your booking experience doesn’t lose them right back to the platform they came from.

The bigger shift I saw in Japan is that OTAs have stopped thinking of themselves as accommodation platforms. They’re focussing hard on the ‘connected trip’: one app where a guest books their flights, hotel, hire car, airport transfers and local experiences, all in a single seamless journey with a single login and a single view of their whole trip. This isn’t a roadmap item anymore. It’s live and it’s being pushed hard.

That matters for accommodation operators because it means OTAs are no longer just a booking channel; they’re becoming the entire trip-planning layer for a huge share of travellers. Once a guest starts their whole itinerary inside one app, the odds they’ll break out of it to book your property directly drop significantly. The convenience of it all becomes powerful. Give guests a reason to want to find you.

The other piece worth watching closely is how AI is being used earlier in the journey, not at checkout, but at the ‘where should I even go?’ stage. OTAs are investing heavily in AI-driven trip inspiration: guests describe a vague idea for a holiday and receive destination, property and itinerary suggestions on the spot. That’s a meaningful shift. It means OTAs are increasingly influencing decisions before a guest even has a destination in mind, let alone a shortlist of properties.

For operators, this raises the stakes on how well your listing content, photography and guest reviews perform inside these AI-driven discovery tools because you’re no longer just being found; you’re being recommended.

None of this is a reason to panic, but it is a reason to stop treating your direct channel as an afterthought. Use OTAs for what they still do brilliantly: visibility and the billboard effect. But close the gap on your own booking experience so that when a guest goes looking for you, booking directly with you is the easy choice, not the harder one.

The operators who’ll do well over the next few years are the ones who understand that OTAs are becoming full-service travel platforms and who make sure their own guest experience is fast enough, simple enough and rewarding enough to earn that direct booking when it counts.

Read more by Chris on AccomNews: Match your strategies to the current economic climate (free strategies included)