An OTA booking isn't the end of a sale. For most properties, it's the start of one they never finish. A guest finds you on Booking.com or Expedia, stays once, and leaves. You paid a commission for that booking, the platform kept the guest's details, and the next time that same guest travels, you pay all over again to win them back. That gap is where most hotel revenue quietly leaks out.
This holds true whether you run a boutique hotel, a golf resort, a multi-amenity resort, or a luxury RV park. More OTA volume won't fix it. You grow by turning the bookings you already get into repeat, direct revenue you keep.
OTAs earn their commission. They put your property in front of millions of travelers who are actively searching, and they fill rooms and sites you'd struggle to sell on your own. The mistake is using only them, and stopping at the first booking.
There's a well-documented pattern behind this called the billboard effect. Cornell's School of Hotel Administration found that roughly 75% of travelers who booked directly with a major hotel brand had previously visited an OTA. The OTA does your discovery for you. A lot of guests see you there, open a new tab, and look you up directly before they decide.
Think about what delivery apps did to restaurants. They bring in orders the kitchen wouldn't have gotten, then take 20% or more off the top and keep the customer. The person who placed the order never becomes a regular because the app owns the relationship, not the restaurant. OTAs do the same thing with your rooms. Strong for reach, costly when they're the only way guests find you.
Every OTA booking can cost you twice. You pay a commission now, commonly 15% to 30% for independent properties, and because the platform owns the guest relationship, you often pay again the next time that guest books.
Run the math on a single guest. A $200 room booked through an OTA at a 20% commission costs you $40 on that stay. Win that same guest back directly and you keep the $40 every time they return. Over a few visits, one captured relationship is worth far more than the booking that started it.
The deeper problem is the data. OTAs keep the guest's contact details and the information around the booking. You get a name on a reservation, not a relationship you can market to. So a guest who loved their stay gets re-marketed by the OTA, usually next to two or three competing properties, instead of hearing from you. To put the scale in perspective, Expedia Group alone reported about $23 billion in lodging gross bookings in a single quarter. That's an enormous audience you can reach once and then keep, if you set things up to capture it.
Capture the guest's contact information while they're on your property, add them to a database, then market to them directly so the next booking comes straight to you. You pay the OTA commission once and own every booking after that. Four steps make it work.
Captured contacts only pay off if you act on them. Sort guests by why they came, then send each group offers that fit. Golfers hear about tee-time packages, event planners hear about open weekday dates, RV guests hear about seasonal rates. Relevant beats frequent every time.
The slow months are where this earns its keep. A segmented list lets you fill specific gaps on purpose: a shoulder-season golf group, a corporate retreat on a quiet weekday, a long-weekend push at the park. Rather than waiting for inquiries to trickle in, you go to guests who already know your property and give them a reason to come back. That's the difference between hoping for a strong off-season and planning one.
Pursell Farms, a luxury golf resort in Alabama, built this kind of system and grew off-season group bookings by 138% year over year, while corporate event revenue climbed from $1M to $1.95M. The property was already well known for golf and weddings. The growth came from capturing demand it wasn't acting on and bringing it back directly during the months that used to sit empty.
The mechanics repeat across property types. Capture the demand you're already paying to acquire, nurture it, and convert it into direct hotel revenue you keep. That's the core of how Booking Doubler™ works for resorts, hotels, and parks.
The real risk is leaning on one source of bookings, whether that's OTAs, a single ad platform, or word of mouth. Spread demand across direct, email, paid, and referrals so one change, an OTA commission hike or an algorithm shift, doesn't blow a hole in your month. Start with what you already have: the guests walking your property right now. Capture them, sort them, and bring them back. OTAs stay in the mix as a way to find new travelers, not as the whole engine.
Capturing and rebooking guests is easier with a checklist in hand. The Shoulder Season Revenue Playbook lays out the exact plays resorts and hotels use to fill rooms, tee sheets, and event space when business is slow. Find out how to capture guest details on-site, which offers bring people back, and the campaigns that turn a quiet month into a booked one.