How to Reduce OTA Commissions: A Practical Guide for Tour Operators

Every tour operator we talk to is having the same conversation in 2026. Online travel agencies have become a genuine distribution channel — Arival reports that OTAs captured roughly one third of bookings in the tours, activities and attractions sector in 2024, up from roughly a quarter in 2019. That is a real shift in where travellers start their decision.

At the same time, the commission an operator pays on each OTA booking is meaningful margin. If you do not have a balanced channel mix, that margin compounds. This guide is the practical playbook we have written down for the operators using Tourist Scan: how to grow the direct side of your business alongside your OTA listings, so the relationship between you and the platform stays healthy for both sides.

1. Start by measuring

Most operators we meet have a rough feel for their channel mix, but rarely a number. The single most useful exercise we can recommend is a quiet hour with last quarter's bookings. Group them by where the booking originated. Note the commission paid on each. The numbers will surprise you in both directions.

The minimum monthly view we recommend keeping:

• Revenue by channel.
• Commission paid by channel, in absolute euros.
• How many of this month's customers were repeat or referred.

These three numbers are the dashboard. Most of the rest of this guide describes how to move them in the directions you want.

2. Think of OTAs as discovery, not as the whole funnel

OTAs are extremely good at one thing: showing your tour to a traveller who has never heard of you. That is the legitimate, valuable service you pay commission for. The problems start when operators rely on OTAs as their only way to reach customers, because then the channel is doing two jobs — discovery and relationship — and the commission is paying for both.

The healthier posture is to treat OTAs as one of three layers in your business:

• Discovery — OTAs, search, hotel partners, posters in the city.
• Capture — the moment a traveller is interested, you save the offer somewhere they will see it again. Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, a saved tab, a printed card.
• Conversion — your direct checkout, OTA confirmation, or walk-up at the meeting point.

The capture layer is the one most operators are missing. It is also the one Tourist Scan was built to provide.

3. Build a direct alternative that is genuinely easy

Travellers gravitate toward OTAs partly because OTA checkouts are short, mobile-friendly, and trust-laden. If your own booking page asks for a name, surname, email, phone, billing address, and a credit card across three screens, the comparison is over before it starts.

The minimum bar for a direct checkout in 2026:

• Loads in a couple of seconds on hotel Wi-Fi.
• One mobile page from intent to confirmation.
• Apple Pay and Google Pay enabled.
• Visible reviews, refund policy, and instant confirmation above the fold.

Your direct experience does not have to be flashier than an OTA's. It has to be at least as effortless.

4. Win the moment at your meeting point

Every tour operator has a meeting point. It is the single highest-trust location in your business. The travellers there have already chosen you. They are open. They tip well. They take photos. They mention you to friends back home.

For decades, the only thing operators handed out at the meeting point was a business card. In 2026, the equivalent is a card the traveller can save to their Apple Wallet or Google Wallet for the rest of their stay. No app to install. No email to type. One tap and your offer lives on their phone for the next week, ready when they have the next free afternoon. More on how this works.

5. Give direct customers something extra, not a different price

Most OTA agreements include price parity. We are not in the business of helping anyone violate them — and besides, undercutting the OTA price on your own website looks like bait-and-switch to your full-price OTA customer.

The healthier approach is direct-only value: free pickup, a complimentary drink, a small photo pack, priority seating, a friend-comes-along discount. The price on the OTA listing and on your website match. The experience for the direct guest is quietly better. Travellers notice.

6. Turn first-time OTA guests into direct repeat guests

When a traveller books through an OTA, the OTA owns the booking. But the moment that traveller walks up to your meeting point, you are face to face with them — and the relationship from that moment forward is yours to earn. We wrote a full guide on this, because it is the single highest-ROI marketing motion most operators are leaving on the table.

The mechanics are simple. You greet them warmly. You deliver a great tour. At the photo handoff, you mention a card they can save to their phone for the rest of the trip. Some save it. Some come back direct. Some bring a friend. The original OTA booking pays for the acquisition; everything after is incremental.

7. Track to the booking, not the click

Vanity metrics are tempting. Page views, scans, follower counts, impression numbers — all easy to brag about, none of them pay a guide's salary. The number that matters is direct revenue per channel per month. If your meeting-point posters drove a few thousand euros in direct bookings last month, and your secondary OTA listing drove a few hundred, you know exactly where to put the next hour of effort.

8. Give the strategy time

Shifting channel mix is not a one-month project. Repeat customers and word of mouth — the two biggest drivers of healthy direct growth — both have long feedback loops. The first ninety days often look like nothing is happening. Operators who keep going usually start to see a clearer pattern by the second season.

A 90-day starter plan

• Days 1–14: Pull last quarter's channel mix. Make sure your direct checkout is genuinely fast and mobile-first. Print or update one Wallet-enabled QR poster per meeting point.
• Days 15–45: Add direct-only perks. Train guides to mention the meeting-point card warmly. Start measuring direct revenue per channel each Friday.
• Days 46–90: Keep your OTA listings clean and helpful. Reinvest any saved commission into the parts of your direct channel that are working.

Where Tourist Scan fits

Most of the moves in this guide work better when the traveller still has a piece of your brand on their phone after they leave you. That is what Tourist Scan provides: a tour operator's offer, saved to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, editable from a dashboard, with three friendly native notifications included. We did not invent direct bookings — we just made it easier for a small operator to capture the moment of interest without asking for an email. See the demo on the home page.

Sources

• Arival, OTAs Now Capture Third of Travel Experience Bookings, arival.travel.