No cost in hospitality is discussed more than OTA commission. Fifteen per cent. Eighteen. Twenty and above with promotional programmes. It has its own conferences, its own consultants, its own strategic projects. There is a good reason for that attention: the number is visible. It sits on a statement, it can be totalled by month, and it can be attacked.
There is a second loss, and it is almost certainly larger. It happens after the reservation is confirmed, while the guest is inside the property's own perimeter, and it never appears anywhere at all.
The mechanics are ordinary. The guest books an airport transfer through a global ride app because nobody offered one at the moment they were thinking about arrival. They eat out every night because the restaurant's availability was never surfaced in a language and a channel they were using. They buy a boat trip through a marketplace that answered instantly at 22:00. They pay for parking down the street. They would have taken a paid late checkout, but no one offered it. They would have upgraded on night two, but the offer never reached them. They never used the spa, because they did not know what was available while they were still deciding what to do with the afternoon.
Each of those is a service the property could have delivered, at a margin, against a cost base already committed. None of them is recorded as a loss. There is no line called revenue we did not capture, no report that reconciles what the guest spent against what the guest spent with us. The commission is a subtraction from a number that exists. Leakage is the absence of a number that never came into being.
This asymmetry distorts strategy. Enormous effort is directed at moving share from OTA to direct — worth doing — while a larger pool of post-booking spending flows out of the property unexamined. Shifting a booking from an eighteen per cent channel to direct recovers a fraction of the room rate. Capturing the transfer, the two dinners, the upgrade and the late checkout can be worth several times that, at a contribution margin the room itself rarely achieves.
The reason leakage persists is not indifference. It is structural. Capturing spend after arrival requires being available at the moment the intent appears — which is often outside working hours, in a language the desk does not speak, about a service that requires a supplier to confirm. A human front desk cannot be everywhere in the guest journey; a static app the guest never opens is not there either. So the guest does what is easy: they ask a platform that answers.
Which means the correct framing of the problem is not commission versus direct. It is whether the property can respond and execute at the moment the guest's intent exists. Every unanswered intent is a payment made to someone else. The property already paid to acquire this guest; the incremental economics of serving them again are the best economics in the business.
So the question worth putting to any revenue meeting is uncomfortable but simple. We know exactly what we paid in commission this month. What did we lose after the booking — and would we recognise it if we saw it?
“The most expensive line in hotel economics is the one that never appears on the P&L.”