A hotel's channel mix: direct booking, tour operators and OTAs

Before arguing about percentages, be clear about what each channel gives you in exchange for what it costs. A channel is not just a source of bookings. It is an agreement about who carries the risk of filling the hotel, who sets the price the guest sees and who keeps the relationship.

Look at the last column. In direct booking, you decide. In every other channel a third party decides, with its own incentives. That is the price of reaching demand that would not arrive on its own. But you should know how many third parties hold a key to the hotel, and in what proportion.

Commission is the number everyone knows and the one that explains the least. To compare channels with judgment, we keep four accounts.

1. Acquisition cost per room night sold. The commission or the intermediary's margin, plus everything the channel drags along: visibility programs, agreed discounts, contributions to the tour operator's campaigns, payment gateway fees, the channel manager subscription, ad spend for your own website. The useful metric is the net rate you keep per night, not the published rate.
2. Dependency. How much of your room nights and revenue depends on that channel, and how long it would take to replace it if it disappeared tomorrow or changed its terms.
3. Price control. Who sets the price the guest sees. In a tour operator package, the room price is hidden. On an OTA, you see it and so does your competition. On your website, you set it.
4. Guest data. Whether, at checkout, you know who the guest is, whether they have consented to hear from you and whether you can sell to them again without paying the intermediary a second time.

With those four accounts, the qualitative picture for most resort hotels looks roughly like this. Use it as a starting point and fill it with your own data, not with this text.

The reading is uncomfortable. The tour operator, cheap in apparent commission, is usually the most expensive in dependency and data. And direct booking, with the best profile across all four accounts, is the only one that demands upfront investment: the cost shows up this quarter and the return arrives later.

Rate parity is the consistency of the price of the same room, for the same dates and conditions, across the channels where it is sold to the public. Some contracts with intermediaries include clauses on it. What exactly binds you depends on your contract and the applicable law, and that is for your legal counsel to review, not your strategy consultant.

What is strategy is deciding what parity you want. If your website is your most expensive channel, you are training guests to book somewhere else.

The most common cause of disparity in the east is not a decision. It is leakage. Net rates negotiated for packages with a tour operator or a wholesaler end up resold as room-only on other channels, below your public rate. The guest sees your hotel cheaper on a website you have never heard of, and your own website loses credibility.

Our recommendation is to separate price from value. The website does not always need to be cheaper. It needs to give a reason to book there: clearer cancellation terms, benefits at the destination, direct contact before arrival. That reason is designed in the hotel's offer ladder, not in the extranet.

The east of the Dominican Republic is a mass air-arrival destination. According to the Central Bank, Punta Cana airport received 72.6% of the non-resident foreign passengers who arrived in the country between January and April 2025. Much of that flow is moved by airlines and tour operators that decide routes, frequencies and hotels from their source markets. For a hotel, that is both an opportunity and an exposure.

The problem is not working with tour operators. It is not knowing how much each one weighs, or what would happen if one left. A tour operator that concentrates many room nights sets, in practice, your average rate, your payment calendar and the kind of guest you receive. If it cuts a route or renegotiates downward, the hotel feels it with no room to react.

We do not give a universal concentration threshold, because it depends on the size of the hotel, the financial strength of the ownership and the quality of the contract. What we do ask is that the threshold be set by the owner, in writing, in the hotel's thesis, with these questions on the table:

• What share of room nights and net revenue the largest tour operator brings, and what share the top three bring together.
• How long the hotel would take to replace that volume through other channels, with the resources it has today.
• Which contract terms protect the hotel: release periods, guarantees, penalties, prepayments, duration.
• Whether the tour operator depends on a single air route or a single source market.
• What guest data the hotel receives, and whether it can use that data to sell to the guest later.

Take a hypothetical scenario: a mid-sized hotel in Uvero Alto whose opening relied on a single European tour operator. Years later, that partner still brings most of the winter room nights. The owners do not want to break the relationship, nor to depend on an annual renewal. The decision is not to cut the allotment. It is to set a ceiling on that partner's share for two seasons out, diversify source markets with a second operator from another country and build direct business for the summer, when the first partner sells less. The tour operator stays central. It stops being irreplaceable.

The most expensive mistake is a single mix for the whole year. The right channel depends on who the guest is and when they come. The segmentation work comes first, with the winnability matrix: which segments are large, which ones you can genuinely win with your product and which ones leave value behind. With that done, the channel crosswalk almost writes itself.

One more criterion completes the table: low season is where the mix is really decided. In high season almost any channel fills rooms. In low season, only the channels you have looked after all year do, and that is where groups, weddings and the domestic market are worth more than their volume suggests.

Changing the mix means negotiating with partners who have known the hotel for years. Done abruptly, you pay in volume and in trust. Done with method, the partner reads it as an evolution of the agreement. This is the sequence, with a deliverable for each step.

1. Signed starting picture. Room nights, gross revenue and net revenue by channel for the last twelve months, with the same definitions for everyone. Deliverable: the signed baseline of the mix.
2. Target mix in the thesis. The owners decide where they want to go, over what timeframe and what they are not willing to do, such as breaking a contract in force. Deliverable: a one-page thesis with ceilings and floors by channel.
3. Capacity before cuts. Nobody reduces a channel until the one meant to replace it is ready: booking engine, groups team, content for travel agencies. Deliverable: action sheets for whoever executes each front.
4. Renegotiation in the natural window. Changes with tour operators are raised at renewal, not mid-season. The allotment is adjusted by dates and room types, not in bulk, and you offer in return what the partner values: priority on peak dates, stability, a differentiated product. Deliverable: the negotiation script and the approved maximum concessions.
5. Explicit communication. The partner hears from you what you are going to do and why. Discovering it in their own sales report is what breaks the relationship. Deliverable: the message, who delivers it and when.
6. Review by period. The mix is read against the baseline at every period committee, and it is corrected with decisions, not reactions. Deliverable: minutes with decisions and owners.

In the Dominican market, the relationship weighs as much as the contract. A representative who has worked with the hotel for years expects to be consulted, not notified.

A mix without fixed definitions gets debated with opinions. The scorecard has few indicators, each with a written definition, a source and an owner. It is always compared against the baseline for the same period of the prior year, not against last month, because seasonality in the east makes month-over-month comparison useless.

Three rules. The owners set the targets. Definitions do not change mid-year, and if they do, the baseline is recalculated. No indicator is read alone, because growing direct business at the cost of low-season occupancy is not an improvement. The indicator architecture and its governance are part of our measurement and governance practice area.

This needs saying plainly, because in hospitality it gets confused often. We do not do operational revenue management or reservations management. We do not load rates, open or close sales, run the channel manager or answer group requests. That is done, and should keep being done, by your revenue and reservations team, your central reservations office or the outside firm you have hired.

What we do is the layer above: decide with the owners what mix the hotel wants and why, write the channel policy, prepare the renegotiations, set the scorecard and direct whoever operates so that their daily decisions serve that strategy. The client decides. We direct. Third parties execute.

The revenue manager optimizes the week. Someone has to look after next season. When the same person does both, the week always wins.

• Judging a channel only by its commission. The cause is that commission shows up on an invoice and dependency shows up on none. The fix is the four accounts and a net rate by channel in the scorecard.
• Inheriting the mix from the opening. The channel that helped fill the first year still weighs the same ten years later because nobody decided again. The cause is that the decision was never written down, so it is never reviewed.
• Wanting direct business without paying for it. Management asks for more website sales without investing in demand generation, without content and without a team that answers the phone and email fast. Direct is the most profitable channel over the medium term and the most demanding in the short term.
• Cutting allotment before a replacement exists. It usually happens after a bad negotiation, out of pride or haste. The result is a season with gaps and a partner who no longer trusts you.
• Treating weddings and MICE as filler. They are handled when they come in, with no product and no calendar, and they are the segments that can carry the low season.
• Leaving the direct strategy to whoever runs the campaigns. An agency can produce excellent campaigns for the website, but it should not decide how much direct business the hotel needs or for which segment. Someone has to brief it with judgment and tell it no when it is time.

Many hotels and small groups in the east are backed by a European or North American owner with a mental model of the hotel market in their home country. Part of that model works in the East. Part of it does not.

What tends to be surplus: expecting reliable market data, expecting the contract to settle the relationship and expecting partners to decide on home-country timelines. What tends to be missing: time for representatives and planners, patience with payment cycles and a reading of demand by source market.

Our work in those cases is translation with method: turning the owner's intuition into a written thesis, testing it against how Dominican tourism distribution really works and leaving a scorecard that lets the owner decide with their own data when there is no market data. The guide for foreign entrepreneurs and the page on our marketing strategy consulting in Punta Cana expand on the approach. If your company sells to hotels rather than running them, the useful guide is selling to hotels in Punta Cana.

1. Ask for the twelve-month picture by channel. Room nights, gross revenue and, if it exists, net revenue. If nobody can give you net revenue by channel, you already have your first finding.
2. Calculate the share of your largest intermediary. What part of rooms revenue it brings. Ask yourself what would happen if it were cut in half.
3. Search for your hotel on five public channels for three different dates and compare with your website. Note any price you do not recognize.
4. Ask who owns the channel policy. If the answer is reservations, or nobody, the decision sits in the wrong place.
5. Write down when each allotment contract expires. That is your agenda for changing the mix over the next two years.