The real cost of an OTA booking isn't the commission — it's the guest

Hotel loyalty membership hit a record 675 million last year, growing more than twice as fast as room supply — yet most marketing budgets still chase strangers while the guests who already chose you sit unused

by Markus Busch

The number hotels sit on. Loyalty membership reached 675 million in 2024, up 14.5% while room supply grew 6.7% — more than twice the pace, per CBRE. Loyalty members now fill 52.8% of occupied rooms. A record share of your guests have already raised a hand. And still, most hotel media budgets go to people who have never heard of the brand.

Program versus audience. The confusion that makes this expensive is treating a loyalty program and a loyalty audience as the same thing. A program is a product feature — points, tiers, status. An audience is a media asset: everyone with a demonstrated relationship with your brand, whether or not they ever enrolled. Past guests who skipped the rewards signup. Direct bookers who came through the site once. App users who checked a rate last week and never finished. The program feeds the audience; the audience is far bigger than the program.

What the OTA actually takes. This is where it turns structural. Direct booking captures roughly 95% of revenue against about 80% through an OTA, and acquisition runs 3–8% of the rate direct versus 13–17% through the channel, on Kalibri Labs' numbers. That commission gap is the cost everyone sees. The cost nobody prices is the guest. An OTA booking hands the relationship to Booking or Expedia, not to you — you cannot email that guest, segment them, or invite them back on your own terms. You rented the booking once, and you will pay full freight to reach that person again, if you ever can.

What to do with it. Treat past guests as a media audience, not a CRM list gathering dust. Upload your first-party segments to the ad platforms and do two unglamorous things: pull guests who booked direct in the last few weeks out of your branded-search bids — you are paying to reconvert someone already coming back — and build a lapsed-but-high-value segment to re-engage before a competitor reaches them. The economics point the budget backward, toward people who already chose you, and not only forward at strangers.

The stake. More than half your occupied rooms last year slept in this audience. Keep buying reach at scale while that data sits idle and the math is unforgiving: you spend your own margin to fill the top of a funnel your competitors buy from too, while the guests who already picked you wait for a message that never comes. The audience is built. Most brands just haven't decided to use it.

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