On a $100 tour, an OTA booking at 30% commission nets the operator about $70 and no customer data. The same booking taken directly nets about $97 after card processing, plus the traveller's email address. The catch is that direct bookings carry an acquisition cost the OTA absorbs — so the real comparison is your blended cost per direct booking against 20–50% commission, not 3% against 30%.
What each channel actually costs
Start with the numbers, because most of the confusion in this debate comes from operators using the wrong ones.
| On a $100 tour | Through an OTA | Direct on your site |
|---|---|---|
| Platform commission | $20–$50 | — |
| Card processing | Absorbed in commission | $1.50–$3.50 |
| You receive | $50–$80 | $96.50–$98.50 |
| Customer email | No | Yes |
| Marketing consent | No | Yes, if you ask |
| Review on your channels | Rarely | Yes |
Two clarifications that cost operators real money every year.
The 8% figure is not your rate. It appears prominently in Viator help-centre pages because those pages are written for affiliates — blogs and websites that refer travellers to Viator. Supplier commission, what you pay as the operator, sits in the 20–30% range before any visibility programme. An operator who prices on 8% is under-costing their most expensive channel by roughly two thirds.
The base rate is rarely the rate you pay. Viator’s Accelerate programme lets operators raise commission in exchange for placement, and in competitive categories effective rates of 30–35% are common, with some operators reporting pressure well beyond that. GetYourGuide starts new operators at 30%. In practice, opting out of the visibility programme in a competitive market means your listing sits below the fold, which is its own kind of cost.
The part most agencies leave out
Here is where most direct-booking pitches quietly cheat: they compare 3% card processing against 30% commission and declare a 27-point win.
That comparison is wrong, and every operator who has tried to build a direct channel knows it is wrong. A direct booking is not free. Someone had to find you. That cost money — in SEO, in content, in ads, in the website that took the booking.
The honest number is your blended cost per direct booking, not your card processing rate.
The useful calculation looks like this: take everything you spent last year on acquiring direct bookings — agency fees, ad spend, the amortised cost of the site — and divide it by the number of direct bookings you took. That number, plus processing, is your true direct cost.
For most operators who have invested properly, that lands somewhere well under 20% and keeps falling, because the SEO and content you paid for last year keeps working this year. Commission does the opposite: it is charged in full on every single booking, forever, and it goes up.
That is the actual argument. Not that direct is free, but that direct has a declining marginal cost and commission does not.
What OTAs are genuinely good at
We are not going to tell you to leave the platforms. Anyone who does is selling something.
- Filling unsold capacity. An empty seat on a coach that is already going earns nothing. A seat sold at 30% commission earns 70% of something.
- Reaching travellers who have never heard of you. Viator and GetYourGuide rank for high-intent queries you would spend years and a great deal of money to compete for directly.
- Early-stage credibility. A new operator with no reviews benefits from a platform where reviews accumulate quickly.
- Last-minute demand. Travellers already in Cairo, deciding tonight what to do tomorrow, are on their phones on a platform app.
The problem was never presence. It is dependence.
The data question
The commission is the cash cost. The strategic cost is that the customer belongs to the platform.
On an OTA booking you generally do not get the email address, you do not get marketing consent, and you cannot ask for a review on your own channels. Every booking is a single transaction with no follow-up. You met a traveller who liked Egypt enough to come, enjoyed your tour enough to rate it five stars, and you have no way to tell them about the Nile cruise you also run.
A direct booking gives you all three. That is why retention is the part of a direct strategy that pays for the rest of it — the second booking costs almost nothing to win.
What share should come from each
There is no universal number, but there is a threshold worth watching. Across the industry, OTA share of activity bookings rose from 28% in 2023 to 37% in 2025, while bookings on operators’ own sites fell from 29% to 25%. The direction of travel is one-way.
Operators whose OTA share sits above roughly half are structurally exposed: a commission increase or an algorithm change on a platform hits revenue immediately, with no fallback. That is not a marketing risk. It is a business-continuity risk.
A reasonable target for an established Egyptian operator is a majority of bookings arriving through channels you control — your site, repeat customers, referrals and agents — with platforms filling the gaps.
How to shift the balance
In this order, because each step makes the next one cheaper.
- Defend your own name. Travellers searching your company by name and landing on a reseller ad are the cheapest bookings you will ever recover.
- Make the site genuinely bookable. Live prices, the traveller’s own currency, a checkout finishable on a phone. If yours is slower than the platform’s, even loyal customers will use the platform.
- Get found independently. Search and AI-answer visibility, so travellers reach you before they reach a listing of your own tour.
- Keep the customer. The email address is the asset. Post-trip flows, review generation and a second booking are where the maths on everything above starts working.
None of this requires leaving the platforms. It requires having somewhere to stand if they change the terms — which, on current evidence, they will.
Our free audit covers search visibility, AI-answer presence, booking flow and what your OTA channel is costing you. Written, and yours whether you hire us or not.