You are probably having a decent year. Revenue is up. Your tours are running well. And somewhere in the background, quietly and without any single decision you made, the share of your bookings coming through Viator, GetYourGuide, or Expedia keeps edging higher.
Direct traffic is a little softer. Your website bookings are down slightly. The margin on each booking feels thinner than it used to. But the overall numbers look fine, so you have not made it a priority.
That gap between "the numbers look fine" and "the business is structurally healthier" is exactly where OTA dependency does its damage. And according to the latest data, the gap is widening for most operators.
The numbers that should concern every operator
Arival's Global Operator Landscape 4th Edition, based on over 5,000 qualified responses from operators worldwide, published its findings in early 2026. The headline: OTAs now account for 37% of all global tour and activity bookings, the highest share ever recorded. That figure was 33% in 2024 and 28% in 2023, a nine-point climb in two years.
Over the same period, direct website bookings fell from 29% to 25%.
This shift is not a distress signal on its own. The same report confirms that global operator revenues exceeded 2019 levels in both 2024 and 2025. The industry has genuinely recovered and is growing. But that is precisely what makes the channel shift worth paying attention to. It is happening during a strong market, when most operators are not feeling pressure to act. The structural risk accumulates quietly.
The cause is not a mystery. Arival is direct about it: rising digital marketing costs and AI-driven changes in search are making direct customer acquisition more expensive and less predictable. As Douglas Quinby, Co-Founder and CEO of Arival, put it: "Operators have largely recovered, but they're entering a far more competitive landscape, defined by higher marketing costs, AI-driven disruption, and the growing influence of OTAs."
The operators who will feel this most are not in trouble today. They will be in a harder position in two or three years, when OTA share is higher, direct-channel muscle has atrophied, and commission-rate renegotiations are harder to win.
What OTA dependency actually costs
Most operators think about OTA cost as a single number: the commission rate. That is the starting point, not the full picture.
The commission line
Viator's baseline commission is around 20-27%, depending on market and placement. GetYourGuide runs 20 to 30%, with a notable episode in mid-2025 when the platform notified some operators of increases reaching above 30%, citing the need to "reflect current market conditions." Many operators who pushed back had the increases reversed, but the episode made visible what most operators already sensed: commission rates are a variable the platform controls, not you.
At 25% average commission on $500,000 in OTA-sourced revenue, that is $125,000 a year in commissions. On $1 million, it is $250,000. These are not small numbers, and they grow proportionally as OTA share grows.
The counterargument operators often make is fair: OTA commission is a marketing expense, and unlike paid search or social advertising, you only pay when a booking actually happens. That logic is sound. The problem is when it becomes a reason not to build anything else.
The customer data you do not own
When a guest books through an OTA, the OTA owns that customer relationship. You get a name, a booking, and sometimes an email address, but you cannot market to that guest again without going back through the OTA. You cannot notify them about a new tour you just launched. You cannot offer them a loyalty discount before peak season. You cannot build a repeat-booker relationship without paying the commission again.
At 37% of all bookings, this is no longer a marginal issue. It is a structural constraint on your ability to build an owned audience, and it compounds over time. Every year that OTA share grows is a year that a larger portion of your customer base sits in someone else's database.
Platform risk
OTA algorithms, ranking logic, commission rates, and policies change, often with limited notice and no negotiation. The 2025 commission increase episode at GetYourGuide was not the first time operators found their cost structure changed unilaterally by a platform, and it will not be the last. Operators who had diversified their distribution and built direct-channel volume had more leverage to push back than those whose GetYourGuide bookings were their primary source.
Visibility on OTA platforms is also linked to sales volume and, in some cases, to the commission level you offer. Operators with thinner margins who are unable to bid up commissions for featured placements face a gradual algorithmic disadvantage relative to larger competitors who can absorb higher rates.
Price commoditisation
On any OTA listing page, your tour sits next to competitors. The comparison interface is designed to make selection straightforward for the traveller: price, star rating, review count, and a few bullet points. In that environment, the premium positioning you have worked to build on your own website largely disappears. Differentiation is harder. Price sensitivity is higher. The customers who find you through OTAs are, on average, less loyal and more price-driven than the customers who find you through search, referral, or direct repeat bookings.
The blended commission rate: a more honest calculation
There is a more useful way to think about the cost of your channel mix: the blended commission rate. This is the average commission you pay across all distribution channels, weighted by the share of bookings each channel generates.
Here is a worked example. An operator with the following channel mix:
- 38% direct bookings at 0% commission
- 37% through OTAs at 25% commission
- 15% through resellers at 10% commission
- 10% through hotel partnerships at 15% commission
Blended rate: (0.38 × 0%) + (0.37 × 25%) + (0.15 × 10%) + (0.10 × 15%) = 11.8%
That is the number that tells you what distribution is actually costing across your whole business. And it is the number that moves when OTA share grows. If OTA share climbs from 37% to 50% with everything else held constant, that blended rate climbs with it, and every incremental percentage point costs you real margin.
The exercise worth doing today: calculate your own blended commission rate. Then model what happens to it at 40%, 45%, and 50% OTA share. That projection makes the stakes concrete in a way that a single commission rate number does not.
Why dependency grows even when operators know the risks
This is not a story about operators making bad decisions. It is a story about rational responses to a difficult environment.
Arival's finding here is worth quoting directly: rising costs are "pushing many operators toward greater OTA dependency by necessity." Paid search costs are higher. Social advertising is less efficient. SEO investment takes time to build and is increasingly disrupted by AI-generated answers replacing organic search results. Only 22% of operators in Arival's survey describe their current digital marketing as "very effective."
In that environment, OTAs are genuinely attractive. They are the path of least resistance to a booking. They sit at the front of the traveller discovery by default. They deliver customers without requiring the operator to invest in an acquisition funnel. The problem is that consistently taking the path of least resistance over months and years is how a 28% OTA share becomes a 37% share, and how a 37% share starts moving toward 45%.
The operators building the most resilient businesses in 2026 are not winning because they rejected OTAs. They are winning because they recognised this dynamic early enough to build a parallel channel while the business was healthy enough to fund that investment.
A framework for rebalancing without abandoning OTAs
The goal is not to cut OTA bookings. It is to grow total bookings in a way that shifts the mix toward owned and lower-cost channels over time. There are three levers.
Lever 1: Convert the guest you have already paid to acquire
The OTA brought the guest to your tour. That acquisition cost is already paid. Your job from that point forward is to convert that guest into a direct relationship for every future booking.
This can be as simple as a business card handed to every guest at the end of the tour, offering a direct booking discount for their next experience. A QR code that leads to your website booking page. A face-to-face mention during the tour: "If you want to book again or bring friends, you'll get 10% off booking directly with us." Many OTA terms allow post-tour communication with guests who have completed a booking; check the terms for each platform you work with.
The economics here are straightforward. You paid 25% commission for that first booking. The second booking, made directly, costs you a fraction of that: whatever your website and email marketing overhead amounts to across all direct bookings. The customer who books twice is more profitable on the second booking than on the first, and the relationship compounds from there.
Lever 2: Build a direct acquisition channel alongside OTA activity
The most durable investment an operator can make in direct bookings is destination content: web pages that rank for how travellers actually plan trips. "Best food tours in [city]." "Things to do in [city] with kids." "Is a walking tour of [neighbourhood] worth it?"
Travellers who find your website during the planning phase have not yet reached an OTA. They are easier to convert directly, less price-sensitive, and more likely to return. Google Business Profile and Google Things to Do offer free visibility in search and on Maps, bypassing OTA placement costs entirely, and are worth optimising properly.
Email list building is the other side of this: every direct booking, every inquiry, and every guest who shares contact details is an owned audience asset. A list of 2,000 past guests who have opted into communication is worth considerably more than 2,000 OTA bookings from anonymous travellers, because you can market to them again at near-zero cost.
Lever 3: Be strategic about which OTAs you work with and on what terms
Not all OTA relationships are equal. Some platforms deliver customers who go on to rebook directly. Others deliver one-time, price-sensitive bookings with no downstream value. Evaluating each platform on net revenue after commission, rather than gross booking volume, tells a very different story about which relationships are worth maintaining and at what commission level.
The GetYourGuide commission increase episode offered a useful lesson: operators who pushed back, with clear data on their booking volume and a credible ability to shift business elsewhere, often succeeded in having increases reversed or reduced. That kind of negotiating position is only available to operators who have built some direct channel volume. It is not available to operators whose single OTA is the primary source of revenue.
Audit your OTA relationships annually. Which platforms are sending you guests who become repeat bookers? Which are sending you price-driven one-time bookers? The answer should inform where you invest in listing optimisation and which commission rates you are willing to accept.
Managing the mix is the job
OTAs are not the enemy. They reach travellers you could not reach on your own, they take payment risk off your hands, and they handle a significant share of the marketing and discovery work that would otherwise fall to you. The commission, viewed in that light, is not unreasonable.
What is unreasonable is allowing that commission to creep upward, across more and more of your bookings, without a deliberate strategy for building parallel channels alongside it.
The data is clear: 37% OTA share in 2025, 25% direct, with the gap widening. The operators who will be in the strongest position in three years are not the ones who cut OTA relationships. They are the ones who used the current strong market to build direct channels and owned audience assets that reduce their dependency, improve their margins, and give them real leverage the next time a platform sends a commission-increase email.
Calculate your blended commission rate today. Model what it would look like if OTA share continues to grow at its current pace. If the trajectory concerns you, you already have the framework for what to do about it.
Sources: Arival Global Operator Landscape 4th Edition: The State of Experiences (2025); PhocusWire, "OTAs Gain Share of Experiences Bookings as Direct Declines" (February 2026); Arival, "GetYourGuide Commission Increasing for Some Operators" (July 2025); Regiondo, Viator vs GetYourGuide commission analysis; GuestFocus, "The Hidden Commission Costs That Destroy Tour Operator Profits."