Over the next several weeks, most Greek hotels will make the commercial decisions that determine much of their 2027.

Rates will be set.

Allotments will be released.

Tour operator contracts will be renewed or renegotiated.

OTA terms will be reviewed.

Existing partnerships will be renewed, reconsidered or adjusted.

These are usually treated as revenue decisions. They're handled by the commercial team, measured against last season's performance and finalised quietly.

But they aren't only revenue decisions.

They determine how much of next August your own brand will be responsible for selling — and how much demand will come through someone else's distribution.

That's a brand decision.

It's just made in a spreadsheet, in October, by people who weren't necessarily asked to think of it that way.

OTA dependency isn't a condition a hotel finds itself in. It's a decision that gets renewed every autumn, usually without discussion.

The data problem underneath

In Issue #35, we looked at why August data can mislead.

Occupancy is supported by peak market demand.

ADR benefits from scarcity.

And even direct booking share needs to be read carefully, because not every direct booking was generated organically by the brand.

Now consider what happens next.

Those numbers become part of the baseline for contracting.

Last year's performance informs this year's allotment decisions.

Last year's direct share influences how much the hotel believes it can sell itself.

Last year's ADR influences what gets contracted, at what rate and through which channels.

The problem isn't that the numbers are wrong.

It's that they don't always explain why the rooms sold.

A property looks at a summer that filled easily, concludes that the current distribution mix works and renews it.

And the mix did work, in one important sense:

the rooms sold.

What the numbers can't always tell you is how much of that result came from the strength of the market — and how much came from the strength of the hotel itself.

So a distribution decision can be renewed on the strength of a result the property may only partly have generated.

What gets locked — and for how long

This matters because contracting decisions have duration.

A campaign can be adjusted in a week.

A rate strategy can be revised during the season.

Contracting decisions are harder to unwind.

Allotments committed in autumn can constrain availability the following summer.

Commercial terms agreed now can influence what the hotel is able to offer through other channels later.

Tour operator volumes can determine how much inventory remains available for higher-margin or direct demand.

By March, when a hotel starts thinking seriously about growing direct bookings, much of the inventory strategy may already have been decided.

Not because anyone consciously decided:

We want to become more dependent on distribution.

The decision simply wasn't framed as being about dependency at all.

A hotel doesn't choose dependency. It signs a series of reasonable contracts, each of which makes the next one harder to avoid.

Three questions worth adding to the contracting conversation

None of this is an argument against contracting.

Fixed volumes reduce risk.

They can help cover fixed costs.

And in a seasonal market with a short selling window, contracted business can be an important part of building a viable commercial strategy.

The argument is much narrower.

There are three additional questions that belong in the contracting conversation.

And they often aren't there.

1. What share of next August do we intend to sell ourselves?

Not:

What share did we sell last year?

But:

What share do we intend to sell next year?

Those are very different questions.

If the answer is exactly the same percentage as last year, that may be completely correct.

But it should be chosen, not inherited.

Because repeating last year's mix is still a strategy.

It's simply a strategy nobody had to articulate.

2. What does each channel actually cost us?

Commission is the visible number.

But commission tells you the transaction cost.

It doesn't necessarily tell you the full commercial cost of the relationship.

There may also be implications around packaged rates, availability, promotional participation, guest ownership, access to first-party data and the acquisition spend required to compete for your own brand in search.

That doesn't make the channel expensive or undesirable.

It means its value needs to be assessed against everything it delivers — and everything the hotel gives in return.

The commission percentage tells you the transaction cost. It doesn't tell you the whole commercial relationship.

3. If we wanted to shift five points of volume to direct next year, what would need to be true by March?

This may be the most useful question of all.

Not five points tomorrow.

Five points next season.

What would have to change?

Perhaps the hotel needs a larger permission-based audience.

Perhaps more returning guests need to know why they should book direct.

Perhaps brand search needs to become stronger.

Perhaps winter communication needs to keep the property in consideration.

Perhaps the hotel simply needs to protect enough inventory so that direct demand has somewhere to land.

The answer will be different for every property.

But one thing doesn't change:

"More direct bookings" isn't a strategy until someone decides where those bookings are supposed to come from.

And that work doesn't begin when the booking window opens.

It begins before it.

Issue #37 looked at what staying present between October and April can actually look like.

Ask this question in October and there's time to build something.

Ask it in April and the answer may already be:

next year.

Why the framing is the hard part

The structural difficulty isn't really analytical.

It's organisational.

Contracting often sits with revenue management or the commercial director.

Brand strategy may sit with marketing.

Direct booking strategy may sit somewhere between marketing, revenue, e-commerce and ownership.

Sometimes it doesn't clearly belong to anyone.

So the conversations happen separately.

At different moments.

With different objectives.

Measured against different KPIs.

And the contracting conversation often happens first.

That matters because it creates the commercial boundaries inside which the later marketing conversation has to operate.

By the time someone asks:

How do we grow direct bookings?

part of the answer may already have been determined by decisions made months earlier by people optimising for a different — and perfectly legitimate — objective.

The solution doesn't require a reorganisation.

It may require just one additional question in the room:

What does this distribution mix mean for our brand dependency twelve months from now?

That question costs nothing to ask.

It's just rarely anyone's specific job to ask it.

The compounding part

This is where the decision becomes more important than a single season.

A hotel that renews broadly the same distribution mix every year doesn't necessarily remain in exactly the same commercial position.

Its ability to generate demand independently can strengthen or weaken over time.

If most available inventory is reliably absorbed through distribution partners, the urgency to build an owned audience can diminish.

Meanwhile, those partners continue building their own customer relationships, data and reach.

Move even a few percentage points in the opposite direction and another dynamic begins.

There is slightly more inventory the hotel needs to sell itself.

That creates slightly more reason to build an audience.

More direct relationships create more first-party data.

More first-party data creates a stronger foundation for future direct demand.

Neither direction announces itself dramatically.

Both are the cumulative result of decisions that looked tactical when they were made.

Five years of either can produce a very different business.

Distribution mix isn't a position you hold. It's a direction you're travelling, decided one October at a time.

What this doesn't mean

This isn't an argument for cutting OTAs.

And it isn't an argument that contracting is a mistake.

Visibility has value.

Incremental demand has value.

Access to markets a hotel couldn't efficiently reach alone has value.

For a seasonal property with high fixed costs and a limited operating window, contracted volume can also be a legitimate risk-management tool.

Pretending otherwise would oversimplify the commercial reality of hospitality.

The argument is narrower:

these decisions deserve to be recognised for what they also are.

Every contracting season sets a ratio between demand the hotel generates itself and demand accessed through distribution partners.

That ratio may be one of the most consequential commercial numbers in the business.

Yet it is rarely discussed as a brand number.

And in many hotels, it is being set before the marketing conversation about next season has even begun.

Next August isn't decided next August.

It isn't even decided when the first campaign goes live in March.

Part of it is being decided now — in the inventory you commit, the channels you choose and the share of demand you decide your own brand should be responsible for generating.

October doesn't just determine how you'll sell next summer.

It determines how much of next summer will actually belong to you.

💬 Worth asking yourself this month

Of next August's rooms, what share do you intend to sell yourself?

And has anyone actually been asked that question — or is last year's answer simply being renewed?