Updated August 2026
For the first time on record, OTAs edged past hotel direct channels in gross bookings in 2024, $266 billion to $262 billion, according to Skift. Most hotel marketing teams already know this. What they don't agree on is what to do about it.
One camp wants to pour the next budget cycle into search and metasearch, chasing travelers who are already comparing properties. Another wants to pull back on paid channels entirely and lean on loyalty and email. Both are half right, and both are missing the same thing: a hotel direct booking strategy isn't a channel decision. It's a sequence.
Hotel direct booking strategies sequence three traveler stages, discover, plan, and book, so each stage carries its own channel and message instead of running one campaign on repeat.
The false choice between the two isn't really about budget. It's about which stage of the booking journey a hotel is willing to invest in measuring, since the payoff from awareness spend shows up weeks later and in a different report than the payoff from a metasearch bid.
Search and metasearch only capture travelers who already know they want to stay somewhere in a given market. Neither channel creates that intent. A hotel running search alone is bidding against every competitor chasing the same already-searching traveler, and a property with no prior recognition pays full price for that click every time.
Pulling back on paid channels to protect margin backfires the same way. A traveler with no memory of a specific hotel defaults to whichever platform they already trust, and for most travelers that's still an OTA. Skift projects direct channels could overtake OTAs as the leading distribution channel by 2030, but that shift only happens for hotels that build the infrastructure now, not the ones waiting for it to happen on its own.
The gap shows up directly in booking value. Hotel websites generated an average of $516 per booking in 2025, ahead of wholesalers, global distribution systems, and OTAs at $312, according to Siteminder. That's not a discount war Sojern's hotel marketing clients are trying to win. It's a case for building the channel where guests already spend more.
The commission is the visible cost. It isn't the whole cost. Every booking that completes on an OTA is a booking where the guest's email, past stay history, and reason for travel stay with the OTA instead of becoming part of the hotel's own first-party data.
That data gap compounds. A hotel with no record of who its guests are can't build lookalike audiences from them, can't send a targeted offer before their next trip, and can't tell a returning guest from a first-time searcher when they show up again months later. The commission gets paid once. The lost data keeps costing the hotel every booking cycle after.
A direct booking strategy works when it treats the booking journey as three distinct stages, each requiring a different message and a different channel, not one campaign running on repeat. Sojern organizes this as Discover, Plan, and Book.
Skip a stage and the traveler either never hears of the property or never gets the nudge to finish the booking on the hotel's own site instead of an OTA.
In the discover stage, a traveler is dreaming about a trip but hasn't picked a hotel, or sometimes even a destination. The property that shows up here has an advantage weeks or months later, when that traveler finally types a search query.
This stage runs through display, native placements, video, and social, channels built for reach rather than an immediate click. A property that runs an inspiring video or display creative in March, while a traveler is still deciding where to go, isn't trying to generate a booking that week. It's shaping which name feels familiar in June, when that same traveler finally searches "boutique hotels" in the destination they picked.
Two problems come up most often at this stage.
Staying top-of-mind in a crowded market. A first-party data strategy is what makes this possible. Collecting even basic detail on past guests, like trip purpose or amenity preferences, gives a hotel enough signal to build messaging that reads as specific instead of generic, well before that guest starts a new search.
Reaching new travelers who look like past guests, not just the same past guests again. Addressable targeting reaches people already inside a hotel's own audience, someone who once booked a spa treatment or paid for an amenity. Contextual targeting extends that reach to new travelers by matching ads to the content they're already browsing, rather than waiting for behavioral history that doesn't exist yet. Used together, the two approaches expand reach without starting from zero on every campaign.
Once a traveler moves into planning, they're comparing specific properties and specific dates. This is where a generic ad stops working, and a relevant offer starts.
Competing against OTA budgets without an OTA budget. Traveler intent data changes what "compete" means here. Instead of bidding broadly and hoping the right person sees the ad, intent signals point to travelers actively researching a specific market, so spend goes toward people who are already close to a decision rather than a wide net that includes people who aren't traveling at all. A property in Miami targeting travelers actively comparing Miami hotels is spending against real intent. The same property targeting anyone who searched "vacation" that month is spending against curiosity.
Keeping past guests from defaulting back to an OTA out of habit. Loyalty and booking history are underused for this. A returning guest who's shown probability to book again, based on past stay data layered with AI-driven scoring, is worth a different offer than a first-time searcher. Treating every guest the same at this stage is how hotels lose repeat bookings to whichever OTA happened to show up first in a new search.
The book stage is where most of the budget conversation happens, and for good reason. This is where the booking either lands on the hotel's own site or slips to a comparison platform at the last moment.
Limited resources with pressure to prove ROI. Search engine marketing and retargeting aimed at travelers who already visited the hotel's site do the most measurable work here, since every dollar can be traced to a click and, in most cases, a completed booking. That traceability is what makes this stage easiest to defend to ownership, even on a tight budget.
Retargeting does the specific work of reminding a traveler who already visited the hotel's site but left without booking. A guest who viewed a suite for a specific weekend and then closed the tab is a warmer audience than anyone in the discover or plan stage, and a retargeting ad that shows availability for those exact dates converts at a different rate than a generic ad ever could.
Reaching price-conscious travelers during shoulder periods. Metasearch is built for exactly this. A traveler comparing rates across platforms sees the hotel's direct rate alongside every OTA listing for the same dates, and if that direct rate holds parity, the booking stays with the hotel instead of paying a third party to deliver it.
None of this works as three disconnected campaigns. The Sojern Traveler Ecosystem™ tracks signals across flight searches, hotel searches, and destination content, so a traveler who showed discover-stage interest in March can be recognized as a plan-stage traveler in May without the hotel manually rebuilding that audience from scratch.
In practice, that looks like a traveler who saw a discover-stage ad for a destination in March, browsed the hotel's website in April without booking, got retargeted in May with availability for the dates they viewed, and searched the hotel by name in June, where its metasearch listing was already positioned to win that click. Each stage did a different job. None of them worked alone.
For hotels running Commission, that sequencing carries less budget risk, since the fee applies only once a guest completes a stay, not on every click along the way.
A discover-stage campaign judged only on last-click bookings always looks like it failed, because that isn't the job it was built to do. Give it a full booking cycle, typically 60 to 90 days for leisure hotels, before deciding whether it earned its place in the budget.
Track direct booking share against OTA share over a full quarter instead of a single campaign's last-click conversions. If the funnel is working, branded search volume and direct site traffic climb over the following one to two quarters, and OTA dependency for that same guest segment starts to drop. A property that starts a quarter at 70% OTA share and ends it at 65% has a working funnel, even if no single campaign in that quarter shows a dramatic spike.
That's a longer window than most ownership groups expect walking into the campaign, which is exactly why it's worth setting before launch, not after the first month's report comes in short.
Most hotels aren't starting from zero. Most hotel direct booking strategies fail at the same point: a hotel already runs the book stage well and stalls trying to layer discover and plan on top of it, instead of building all three with the same intent. A property already running search and metasearch has the book stage covered and needs the discover and plan stages layered on top, not a rebuild of what already converts.
A hotel's own booking data already shows where OTA dependence runs highest. That's the clearest signal for which stage to build first. A hotel with strong branded search volume but weak direct site traffic from unbranded terms is usually missing the discover stage. A hotel with steady site traffic but a high abandonment rate on the booking page is usually missing the plan-stage retargeting that would bring that traveler back with the right offer.
For a broader look at how this fits into a hotel's overall marketing plan, Hotel Marketing Strategies: A Goal-Based Guide organizes strategies by business goal rather than funnel stage, useful if the starting question is "what problem am I solving" rather than "where is this traveler right now."
Talk with our team to see what a Discover-Plan-Book strategy could look like for your property. Let's talk.
A hotel direct booking strategy is a plan for winning bookings through a hotel's own website instead of an OTA, built around three traveler stages: discover, plan, and book. Each stage uses a different channel and message, from brand awareness early on to search and metasearch once a traveler is ready to book. Hotels that run all three together typically see OTA dependency drop faster than hotels running a single channel.
Hotels compete by targeting narrower, higher-intent audiences instead of trying to outspend OTAs broadly. Traveler intent data identifies people actively researching a specific market, and addressable targeting reaches guests already inside a hotel's own audience. That focus makes a smaller budget go further than a wide, unfocused campaign.
Give a new direct booking strategy a full booking cycle, typically 60 to 90 days for leisure hotels, before evaluating results. Discover-stage campaigns build recall that shows up later as branded search and direct site traffic, not as immediate bookings. Judging early-funnel spend on last-click conversions alone will always make it look like it underperformed.
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