About the Alliance

A note from our Executive Director

Today, OTAs drain $60–$80 billion a year out of the travel industry. And for nearly twenty years, I helped them do it.

That money flows out of the pockets of travelers, operators, and local economies — and into the hands of Big Travel and Big Tech. It enriches those who coordinate the industry rather than those who provide the experience. Over the long term, that isn’t healthy for travel.

As an affiliate of Travelocity, Expedia, and later Booking.com, I routed over $100 million in hotel bookings to the major OTAs. There was no easy way for me to monetize sending travelers straight to the operators. So like most other affiliates, I sent the bookings through the middlemen instead, reinforcing their position with each one.

Don’t get me wrong — the OTAs add real value. They give travelers trust, recourse, and the ability to compare options at once. They’ve built recognizable brands, rewards programs that span the industry, and an experience that makes booking online feel safe and simple. And the direct channel hasn’t really had an alternative. Each operator is a silo, with no shared layer to give the channel platform advantages of its own. When a traveler wants to book somewhere new, they have nowhere to turn but back to the OTAs. So the OTAs became the coordination layer by default — facilitating the recirculation of travelers across the industry, and extracting substantial profits for the service.

The expectation in the AI era is that operators will connect directly with travelers and bypass the OTAs altogether. What’s playing out is different. AI engines are turning to the OTAs first because they have what AI needs: aggregated supply, live availability and rates, recognizable brands, and a one-stop solution. The direct channel is still fragmented, and it’s far more efficient for an AI engine to query a handful of OTA pipelines than to engage with hundreds or thousands of individual operators to compare prices across a destination. So during search and price comparison, AI engines default to the OTA pipeline — and the risk is that the OTAs become even more entrenched. The direct channel needs an aggregation layer of its own to compete on equal footing.

That’s why I’m building the Direct Booking Alliance. Not to tear down what exists, but to build what’s always been missing: a place for operators, technology partners, platforms, and industry allies to find each other, work together, and create a more efficient, more fair travel industry — one that returns more value to the people who contribute to it.

If you’ve ever felt like the deck was stacked against direct booking, you were right. But the opportunity to change that has never been greater. I hope you’ll join us.