Direct vs. OTA Is the Wrong Argument, And These Numbers Prove It
Nobody told me direct booking was supposed to be hard. I didn’t know it was a whole debate with sides and conference panels. I was employee number four at a resort that barely existed yet, and every booking we had belonged to Airbnb. Not us. If they changed an algorithm on a Tuesday, our Wednesday could vanish and there was nothing we could do about it.
That’s what bothered me from a businesses perspective before I knew anything about indsutry standards. Not the commission. The fact that we didn’t own a single thing. Our whole business sat on rented land, and the landlord could raise the rent or change the locks whenever it wanted.
So I set out to fix it. Not because I’d read something about the book-direct movement. In 2023, I didn’t know there was one. Because renting your entire business from a company that can evict you overnight is a bad way to live, no matter what industry you are in. It took me a good while, elbow-deep in the actual problem, to look up and realize the whole industry was arguing about the wrong thing.
Everybody Bought the Website. Almost Nobody Can Fill It.
Here’s the number that should end the debate. “As of early 2026, about 70 percent of operators had a direct-booking website. Nearly two-thirds of them still get under a quarter of their bookings direct. Eighteen percent get none at all.” – According to Arival’s 2026 Global Operator Landscape Study
Read that again. Everyone bought the storefront, while nearly just as many are struggling to fill it. That’s not an awareness problem. You don’t accidentally buy a booking website. That’s an execution problem, and it’s the one nobody wants to talk about. The industry loves to talk about direct booking like the hard part is knowing you should do it. It isn’t. People clearly know, they went out and bought the site. The website sat there and the bookings never came, because a website was never demand. Owning the channel and being able to fill it are two completely different skills, and the whole “direct vs. OTA” argument pretends they’re the same.
They are not the same, and confusing them is why so many operators spend money on a book-direct setup and watch nothing happen.
What Owning Your Demand Actually Takes
Over two years at ReTreet, we went from 100 percent OTA-dependent to 93 percent direct. People quote that number like it was the goal. It wasn’t. The goal was control. Ninety-three percent was just the scoreboard telling me we finally had it.
Getting there wasn’t a switch I flipped. I didn’t turn off Airbnb and turn on a website. I built demand we generated ourselves — creators who brought us people who already trusted them, a referral program that turned guests into a booking channel, tourism partners who put us in front of travelers already coming our way. Piece by piece, we built the one thing that lets you stop relying on anybody else: our own demand. The whole time, we stayed connected to major OTA platforms through a PMS.
Then I watched the same lesson from the other side. A luxury outdoor brand brought me in for three months because 90 percent of their bookings came from paid ads. And here’s the thing I say to every operator who thinks OTAs are the problem: an OTA-only business and an ads-only business are the exact same disease. Both are rented demand. Stop paying and it’s gone in a matter of weeks. Nothing accumulates. You own nothing at the end of it.
Rented is rented. Whether you’re renting from Airbnb or renting from the ad auction, the day you stop paying is the day the bookings stop coming. We took that brand from 90 percent paid down to 50 in three months. Not by killing the ads. By building demand the business actually owned underneath them, so the ads became a choice instead of life support. Same problem, solved by a system not different tactics.
The Argument Worth Having
So here’s the reframe. The question was never “this channel or that one.” It’s whether you have the knowledge, the resources, and the money to build demand systems that lower your reliance on any third party over time. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Which means OTAs aren’t the enemy, and anyone telling you to rage-quit them is going to hurt you. The average operator still gets close to half their bookings from Airbnb alone. Operators who run several channels report steadier revenue than the ones betting everything on one. OTAs are the best discovery engines ever built for this industry, putting you in front of travelers who would never, ever find you on your own.
The problem was never that OTAs exist. The problem is needing them because you have no other way to make demand appear. That’s not a channel you chose. That’s a hole in what your business can do.
Why the Platforms Keep Winning
I’ll give the platforms their due, because it’s the honest thing to do. They win because they’re extraordinary at the one thing most properties are bad at: manufacturing demand. That’s their real product. Not the listing page, the flow of people. They solve the exact problem the execution gap exposes, and they solve it well.
That’s why the reliance turns into a crutch. When you can’t make your own bookings, leaning on the company that can feels less like a weakness and more like survival. And a crutch is hard to put down, because the moment you lean off it, the thing you couldn’t do is still the thing you can’t do. Buying a website doesn’t fix that. You swapped the storefront and kept the same empty hands. It’s the whole reason two-thirds of operators own the site and still can’t fill it.
You don’t beat the platforms by resenting them. They’re good at the thing you’re bad at, so get good at it. That’s the only move that works when building systems that reduce reliance on them.
The Question I've Learned to Ask
Stop asking “how do I get more direct and fewer OTA bookings?” Ask “can I make demand on my own, or am I renting all of it?”
The first question sends you shopping for a booking widget. The second sends you to build the engine that makes the widget worth having. And that question has a real answer, because demand you build is demand you keep. Whether it comes through your own site, an OTA, or a partner who sent someone your way.
Direct booking was never the point. Owning your demand is. Get that right and the channel mix stops being a fight and turns back into what it always should have been: your call.
I’m Sarah Stahl, a hospitality marketing strategist helping vacation rental and boutique hospitality brands win direct bookings and own their demand. My specialty is creator systems: structured programs that turn creators into a steady source of direct bookings, not one-off posts. I’ve worked with nearly 500 creators and built the system that took ReTreet Resort from six treehouses to 21 units at 93% direct bookings without PPC. I’ve since applied it at Wilding Hotels, where direct bookings rose 50%, and now bring it to hotels and short-term rental managers as founder of Market Movers.
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