Expedia is not your enemy.
Expedia is your landlord.
There is a difference. Enemies want to destroy you. Landlords just want the rent. On time. Every month. Without interruption. And if you keep paying it, they are perfectly happy to let you believe the arrangement is working.
The arrangement is not working.
The Landlord You Chose
Nobody forced the luxury hotel industry into this relationship.
Twenty years ago the industry looked at a platform that could fill rooms and said yes. Rooms filled. The arrangement felt efficient. It felt modern. It felt like distribution strategy.
What it actually was: the industry handed someone else the keys to the building and kept paying to use the front door.
Expedia did not take anything. The industry gave it. Gave it the introduction. Gave it the comparison. Gave it the guest relationship. Gave it the data. Gave it the next booking and the one after that. And then paid a commission on all of it.
That is not a partnership. That is a lease on a building you could have owned.
The Guest You Already Know
There is a guest in your system right now who has stayed with you four times.
You have their name. Their preferences. Their email address. Their anniversary date. A note about the room they always request. You have the relationship. You built it. You earned it. It exists because you delivered something worth returning to.
They went to Expedia. They found you. They booked.
You paid the commission.
You just paid your landlord rent on furniture you already own.
That guest was not acquired. That guest was already yours. The platform did not introduce you to anyone. It processed a transaction and collected a fee for doing so. And because the hotel industry never bought the building, that fee was legitimate. The lease says so.
Expedia Is Essential. That Is Exactly the Problem.
For the traveler who has never heard of you, Expedia is a necessary channel. It reaches audiences at a scale independent properties cannot match. The commission on a new guest is the price of being found by someone who did not know you existed. That is defensible. That is acquisition.
But the guest who stayed in March and September and the March before that does not need to be acquired. They are already acquired. They are already yours. The only question is whether you are going to reach them before the landlord does.
Most hotels do not reach them first.
Most hotels pay the rent instead.
And every time they do, Expedia gets stronger. The platform takes the behavioral data from that transaction. The booking path. The search behavior. The price point. It uses that intelligence to intercept the next booking from that same guest. With commissions your property paid. On guests your property earned.
The landlord is renovating the building with your rent money. And the renovations make it harder to leave.
Paying to Rent Your Own Furniture
This is not an argument against Expedia.
Expedia is doing exactly what a landlord does. Collecting rent. Maintaining the infrastructure. Making itself indispensable. There is nothing dishonest about it.
The problem is not the landlord.
The problem is the hotel industry’s thirty-year decision to keep renting instead of buying.
Every returning guest who books through Expedia is another month’s rent on a relationship the property already owns. The guest was earned. The relationship was built. The repeat was deserved.
And somewhere between that guest deciding to come back and the confirmation email hitting their inbox, the industry paid a commission to be introduced to someone they already knew.
That is not distribution strategy.
That is paying rent on your own furniture.
The furniture was yours the whole time.
The lease just never expired because nobody canceled it.
