Booking.com and Expedia now shape how most of your international guests find you.

In 2024, for the first time, gross bookings made through online travel agencies overtook gross bookings made directly with hotels: roughly $266 billion through OTAs against $262 billion booked direct, according to Skift Research. It was a narrow crossover, the kind of statistic that looks unremarkable in a single year. It's far more significant as a direction of travel, because of who sits on the other side of that $266 billion, and what that means for a small operation trying to fill twelve rooms in the Waterberg or the Cape Winelands.

Two companies, Booking Holdings and Expedia Group, account for roughly 42% of the global online travel agency market, according to Skift Research. Their grip is tighter still in Europe specifically, the source market most South African lodges depend on for international guests: in the most recent regional breakdown published by Statista, Booking.com alone holds around 71% of Europe's online hotel bookings, with Expedia Group holding a further 11%, putting the two companies north of 80% of Europe's online hotel distribution combined. Booking Holdings alone drew over 400 million monthly visits to Booking.com in its most recent reporting, on revenue of $23.7 billion. Expedia Group, the other half of the duopoly, reported $13.7 billion. Between the two of them sits a portfolio of brands built almost entirely through acquisition rather than organic competition: Booking Holdings owns Priceline, Kayak, and Agoda; Expedia Group owns Orbitz, Travelocity, and Vrbo, among others.

This matters most for exactly the kind of property Vicinity works with: independently owned boutique lodges, guesthouses, and smaller safari camps that sell largely on their own, rather than the handful of ultra-premium private reserves with decades-old trade relationships that route most of their beds through specialist tour operators. For an independent South African property in that boutique tier, the practical effect of Booking Holdings and Expedia's scale is easy to miss because it doesn't show up as a single dramatic event. It shows up as a slow erosion of choice, and it lands harder on a small operation charging in Rand than it does on a large chain with negotiating scale.

Consolidation doesn't feel like consolidation

When a market has two dominant buyers of your distribution, "shopping around for a better commission" stops being a meaningful strategy. If Booking.com's terms don't suit you, your alternative is Expedia, which frequently owns several of the other platforms you might have considered switching to instead. The appearance of competition between individual brands (Booking.com versus Priceline, Expedia versus Orbitz) often disguises the fact that the commercial terms, cancellation policies, and algorithmic ranking logic ultimately answer to the same two parent companies.

This matters because negotiating leverage in any commercial relationship comes from having a credible alternative. Imagine a twelve-room boutique lodge or guesthouse in the Waterberg or the Cape Winelands that gets 40% of its international bookings through one platform (a plausible figure for a small property reliant on OTA discovery, not a reported statistic): it cannot credibly threaten to walk away, and it has nowhere meaningful to walk to if it did. The concentration of the market removes the leverage before the negotiation even starts, and a small South African property, priced in Rand and negotiating from a position most global account managers will never prioritise, feels this more acutely than a hotel group with hundreds of properties on its books.

The risk isn't the commission. It's the concentration.

Most conversations about OTA dependency focus on the commission rate, a number between 10% and 25%, sometimes higher, depending on the platform, region, and property type. That number is real, but it isn't the largest risk. The larger risk is what happens when the majority of a property's international demand generation depends on decisions made by one or two companies whose incentives are not aligned with any single lodge's, let alone a small operator on the other side of the world from their head office.

The kinds of decisions this concentration puts entirely in someone else's hands: an algorithm change that deprioritises smaller or newer listings, a shift in cancellation-policy defaults that increases exposure to late cancellations from long-haul travellers rebooking flights, or a change to how loyalty-tier discounts are calculated, quietly compressing the rate a property actually nets once converted back from dollars or euros into Rand. These are illustrative of the kind of risk concentration creates, not a list of changes that have been announced. None of them would require the property's agreement, input, or even advance warning if they did happen. A South African lodge that has built its international pipeline around one or two platforms has, in effect, outsourced its own revenue policy to a company it has never met and that has never set foot on the property.

What actually changes owner leverage

The answer isn't to boycott OTAs. For most independent South African properties, especially newer ones building initial visibility with overseas travellers, OTAs remain a legitimate and often necessary discovery channel. The answer is to change what percentage of total revenue depends on that channel, because percentage is the only lever an individual property actually controls.

• Treat OTA channels as a top-of-funnel discovery tool, not a revenue strategy. Their job is to get a stranger in London or Frankfurt to notice your lodge exists. What happens after that first touch is where you should be doing your own work.

• Spread your third-party listings across South African platforms too, not just the global duopoly. SafariNow, TravelGround, and LekkeSlaap were all built specifically for South African lodges, guesthouses, and B&Bs (TravelGround and LekkeSlaap are sister brands under the same South African parent company, so they're not fully independent of each other, but both are independent of the global duopoly). None of them replace a direct channel, and none of them are free of commission, but every booking that comes through a local platform is a booking that isn't concentrating your risk in Booking Holdings or Expedia Group specifically, and local account teams are usually easier to actually reach.

• Build a second, independent channel deliberately, not accidentally. A direct booking engine that's fast, mobile-friendly, and visually consistent with your brand is table stakes. Without deliberate investment in getting guests to it, through search, social, referral, and direct relationships, it sits idle while OTA traffic does all the work.

• Track the ratio, not just the total. A property can grow overall revenue every year while its OTA dependency quietly increases as a share of that revenue. Total revenue growth in Rand terms can mask a shrinking margin and a growing concentration risk at the same time.

• Negotiate what can still be negotiated. Even inside a duopoly, individual account terms (commission tiers, promotional participation, payment timing) are not fixed. South African properties that never ask, never receive, and account managers rarely volunteer better terms to a property that has never raised the question.

The consolidation of OTA distribution into two dominant players is not a reason for independent South African properties to panic. It's a reason to be precise about which parts of the relationship are genuinely useful, visibility to distant markets, and which parts represent a dependency that compounds against the property year over year if left unmanaged. The negotiating leverage that's disappeared from the platform relationship has to be rebuilt somewhere else: in the size and quality of the direct channel a property builds for itself.