- For more than a decade, the story of hotel distribution seemed to have a single protagonist: online travel agencies grew year after year, gained visibility, expanded their inventory, and established themselves as one of the main gateways connecting travelers and accommodation providers. Their ability to offer price comparison, instant booking, global reach, and an increasingly optimized user experience made them key players within the tourism ecosystem.
However, the evolution of distribution over the last ten years suggests that the market has entered a different phase. Not because OTAs have lost importance. Quite the opposite: they remain a strategic channel for demand generation and continue to account for a very significant share of tourism bookings. What seems to have come to an end is the idea that their growth must necessarily come at the expense of all other channels.Today’s reality reflects a more balanced redistribution of the market. While online travel agencies have consolidated their position, other players have also adapted and strengthened their value proposition. Far from disappearing, as many predicted, tour operators have evolved toward more specialized models, leveraging package holidays, source market expertise, contracting capabilities, and product development. In certain segments and destinations, they continue to demonstrate a remarkable ability to generate volume and stable demand.
At the same time, hotels have made a significant effort to strengthen direct sales. Improvements in booking engines, the development of loyalty programs, more sophisticated digital marketing strategies, and better customer relationship management have helped direct channels regain ground that, a decade ago, seemed clearly dominated by the major online intermediaries.
The result is a much more diversified ecosystem than the one that existed ten years ago. Hotel distribution no longer revolves around a single dominant player but instead relies on a combination of channels with complementary roles. OTAs provide global visibility and customer acquisition capabilities. Tour operators continue to play an important role across numerous markets and tourism products. And direct sales are gaining momentum wherever hotels can build a distinctive value proposition and foster closer relationships with their guests.
This is why we believe that OTAs have stopped growing… alone. Tourism distribution appears to have reached a level of maturity where success depends not on the supremacy of a single channel, but on the balance among several of them. Rather than a battle between intermediaries, the market has evolved into a multichannel model in which each player adds value at different stages of the customer journey. This transformation has also been accompanied by a reorganization of the distribution chain. Some traditional intermediaries have seen their relative influence decline, while OTAs, tour operators, and direct channels have strengthened their respective positions. The result is a commercial landscape that is more concentrated, yet also more clearly defined and specialized.
The main lesson of the last decade is that diversification creates resilience. When demand is distributed across several strong channels, hotels reduce their exposure to abrupt market shifts, gain greater adaptability, and achieve a more sustainable balance between volume, profitability, and commercial control. And just as this new equilibrium seems to have become firmly established, a new factor is emerging that could once again reshape the landscape: artificial intelligence. The rise of assistants capable of searching, comparing, recommending, and completing bookings autonomously raises important questions about how purchasing decisions will be made in the future. It is still too early to assess the full impact of this change, but all indications suggest that the next major transformation in tourism distribution may not be tied to a specific channel, but rather to the way travelers interact with all of them.
Cristina Torres, Director of Communications
cristina.torres@dingus.es
