For twenty years, travel distribution has been a marketplace problem. The next chapter is being written as a network problem — and the economics are different.
For the last two decades, the dominant story in travel technology has been a marketplace story. Online travel agencies raised capital, bought traffic, aggregated supply, and placed themselves between travelers and the businesses they wanted to reach. It worked, at least for the marketplaces. Booking Holdings and Expedia Group together now sit on roughly 70% of global online travel spend. Commissions of 20 to 35% became normal. And the hotels, tour operators, and destinations that supplied the inventory learned to treat those commissions the way retailers once treated shelf-slotting fees: painful, but the cost of being seen.
That model is now straining under its own economics, and a different structural answer is starting to take shape. It doesn’t look like a better marketplace. It looks like an alliance.
The marketplace era has run out of margin
The marketplace logic was simple, and for a long time effective. Aggregate demand in one place, charge suppliers for access to it, reinvest the margin into buying more demand. The reinvestment step is where things have quietly broken.
OTAs are now among the largest advertisers on Google and Meta. Industry estimates put annual OTA spend on intercepting travelers at north of $20 billion. Much of that spend targets branded search terms belonging to the OTAs’ own supplier partners. A hotel pays commission on a booking, then watches the same OTA outbid it on its own brand name the next week. Travel customer acquisition costs have risen roughly 35% since 2022, according to sector benchmarks, and conversion gains have not kept pace.
At the same time, roughly 92% of hotel guests never return to the same property. For independent tour operators the number is worse. The industry has spent a generation optimizing the moment of booking while leaving the much larger economic question, what happens to a traveler before and after that transaction, almost entirely to the marketplaces that profit from it.
For a B2B platform investor, the pattern is familiar from other categories. When the intermediary’s cost of acquiring demand starts rising faster than the margin it extracts from suppliers, the suppliers look for a way out. In payments, that question produced open banking. In media, it produced direct subscriptions. In travel, the emerging answer is the alliance.
Why alliances, not marketplaces, are the next shape
Alliances are not new in travel. Star Alliance has coordinated routing, loyalty, and data across competing carriers since 1997. Marriott Bonvoy, effectively an alliance of brands under one membership program, now drives more than half of Marriott’s global room nights through direct, member-originated channels, a share that has climbed steadily as OTA dependence has been deliberately trimmed. The lesson from both is structural. Participants who share consented customer relationships inside a trusted network can defend margin that none of them could defend alone.
What has changed is that the infrastructure to run this kind of arrangement is no longer the exclusive property of multinational chains and airline holding companies. The same patterns that reshaped other B2B categories, federated data exchange, consent-based identity, credit and clearing systems, API-first interoperability, are now mature enough to be built for a fragmented supply side. Most of the travel industry is fragmented. There are millions of independent hotels, tour operators, DMCs, attractions, and destinations. None of them has the balance sheet of a Marriott. Collectively, they have more travelers than any OTA.
That is the opening a new category of platform is moving into. The working label is shared-demand network. In plain language, an alliance.
What an alliance-model platform looks like in practice
A useful working example is TravelNet, a platform recognized earlier this year by the World Travel & Tourism Council as Most Innovative Startup of the Year at the 2025 TravelTech Startup Fest. TravelNet’s core proposition is that members capture consented traveler leads from their existing touchpoints, contribute those leads to a shared pool, and earn reach inside the network in return. No bookings flow through the platform, and no commissions are taken.
What is technically interesting is less the product than the design choice underneath it. The system treats marketing reach as something you accumulate by contributing to the network, rather than something you rent by the impression. Matching is built around emotional and contextual fit rather than keyword auctions, which is a reasonable bet given that travel decisions rarely start with a destination and almost always start with a feeling. And the data layer is first-party by design, which sidesteps both the collapsing third-party tracking stack and the AI-discovery layer that is reshaping how travelers find anything at all.
None of these are travel-only choices. They are the same primitives showing up across B2B platforms whose suppliers have decided they would rather coordinate than compete for the same intercepted traffic.
Who can actually opt out
The most telling evidence that the alliance pattern works is that some operators have already exited the marketplace economy entirely. Premier Inn, the UK’s largest hotel chain with more than 800 properties, has refused to list on Booking.com, Expedia, or any major OTA for more than a decade. The strategy is still in force in 2026. The chain runs almost exclusively on direct digital distribution through its own brand, app, and corporate booking channels, and it is consistently among the most profitable hotel businesses in Europe.
Premier Inn can do this because it has built, in effect, its own alliance: a strong brand, a captive corporate channel, a high-recognition loyalty proposition, and the operational scale to make direct booking the cheapest route for the customer. Most of the travel industry cannot replicate that on its own balance sheet. What changes with a shared-demand network is that the same exit becomes available to operators who could never afford to walk away from OTAs alone. A single boutique hotel cannot delist from Booking.com without losing visibility. A network of ten thousand independent properties, sharing consented traveler relationships and direct distribution infrastructure, can.
That is the real strategic question the alliance model raises. Not whether OTAs will be displaced, but how much of the long tail of travel supply now has a credible route out.
Why this matters beyond travel
The alliance pattern is not uniquely a travel story. Any B2B category that shares three conditions, fragmented supply, a dominant intermediating marketplace, and rising customer acquisition costs, is a candidate. Local services, independent retail, specialty healthcare, and parts of professional services all fit. Travel is ahead mostly because the pain is worst there first.
For investors and founders watching platform shifts, the shape is worth a serious look on its own merits. Marketplaces were the defining B2B platform pattern of the last twenty years. Networks where suppliers coordinate to keep the customer relationship rather than rent it back from an intermediary are a plausible candidate for the next twenty. They do not require displacing the marketplaces to succeed. They only need to give suppliers an alternative route to the customer that is economically better than paying the toll.
The shift worth watching
None of this makes the OTAs disappear. They remain enormous, well-capitalized, and useful for certain kinds of demand. What is changing is that they are no longer the only shape a travel technology platform can take. The companies building the next layer are not trying to be better marketplaces. They are building the infrastructure that lets the supply side act like a network.
If that bet is right, the most interesting travel-tech story of the next few years will not be which OTA wins the AI search race. It will be how much of the industry quietly moves out of the marketplace economy altogether, the way Premier Inn already has, and into a coordinated direct-distribution layer that, on a long enough timeline, looks less like Expedia and more like Visa.
Travel is usually a late adopter of B2B platform patterns. This time, it may be the category that shows the rest of them what comes next. (travelnet.biz)
