Why you need your own sales channels

Run a winery, a glamping site, a travel agency, or anything like that? This one's for you.

Every tourism business owner needs to build their own sales channels. Your WhatsApp, your Instagram, your website, your link, your brand. Places where customers reach out to YOU, not to a platform that charges you for the intro.

Two reasons. You stand out from the big players, and you stop handing your margin to a middleman.

This isn't just my opinion. The biggest companies in the world are already doing it.

The big players have already figured this out

Everyone is talking about agentic commerce: an AI agent that searches, compares and buys on your behalf. Platforms are connecting to ChatGPT and Claude through MCP, an open standard that lets AI assistants work with real systems. Watch what they open up and what they hold back, and a clear pattern emerges.

Hilton puts its live rates inside ChatGPT, Claude and Google, but the moment you hit book, you land on Hilton.com. As its CIO put it: "The single biggest risk is losing the direct relationship with our guests." Booking's Claude connector will find you a place to stay, but you can't book or pay there. And when Booking bet on agents, it built its own: Vayo, a standalone startup it plans to put 100 million dollars into. Mercado Libre, per BNamericas, is "deploying many engineers" to build its own agents because it's worried about getting disintermediated.

They'll show you the storefront. They're not handing over the register.

They all want the same thing: to own the customer relationship and the sale. If Hilton, with 260 million loyalty members, won't let anyone else charge its guests, imagine what that means for a glamping site with six domes.

Reason 1: on someone else's platform, you're just another listing

Sell through an OTA or a marketplace and you're one listing out of forty, ranked by an algorithm you don't control. And moving up costs money. Booking spells it out in its Partner Hub: programs like Preferred Partner and Visibility Booster add commission on top of the base rate. Viator has Accelerate: pay a higher commission and it shows you more. You're paying to be seen.

What makes you special doesn't fit on that card. Your guide knows every bend of the river, you tell guests where the good food is, you remember they brought the kids last time. That comes through in a conversation, on your channel.

And it's about to get even tighter. When a traveler asks an AI for a recommendation, there's no page two: you get two or three names. Yaco explained why in this post. If your only storefront is someone else's agent on top of that, you're a line item in a list you have no say over.

A customer who comes in through a platform belongs to the platform. HOTREC, the European hotel association, says as much in its 2024 distribution study: it accuses Booking of withholding guest data and keeping hotels from offering better prices on their own websites. It also found that OTAs undercut the hotel's own price 4 times out of 10.

Reason 2: commissions eat your margin

Here are the numbers, from official sources.

• Airbnb, stays. Under the single-fee structure, now mandatory for most hosts, Airbnb takes 15.5% out of your payout. In Brazil and Mexico, it's 16%.
• Airbnb, experiences. Same page: experiences typically pay a 20% fee.
• Booking. There's no single number: it depends on the country, the property type and your contract, plus whatever you opt into for visibility. Which?, the UK consumer group, reported that OTAs like Booking and Expedia typically take 15% to 25% per room.
• Viator and GetYourGuide. Neither publishes a fixed rate. Viator says commission varies by location. GetYourGuide's contract lets it raise your commission if its own costs go up, and you're not allowed to tell anyone what you pay. A piece on Arival, a go-to resource for the experiences industry, put Viator at 25% to 30% and GetYourGuide at 20% to 30%.

Now do the math. Airbnb's own example: charge 100 dollars a night and the 15.5% fee leaves you with 84.50.

A hypothetical example: a horseback ride at 50 dollars a head, for a group of four. That's 200 dollars. At a 20% commission, 40 goes to the platform. And keep in mind the commission comes off everything you bill. If you clear 30% on that ride after paying for the horses, the guide and insurance (another example number), the platform just took two thirds of your profit.

That happens on every booking. Including the second one, when the same customer books again through the same app because they never got your WhatsApp.

This doesn't mean quitting Booking

Platforms put you in front of people who'd never have found you otherwise, and there's nothing wrong with using them. Even the Arival piece makes the point: someone who booked you through an OTA the first time can book you directly the next time.

The problem is when the platform is your ONLY channel. Use it to get discovered, then move the relationship to your own channel. That way, when that customer comes back, you're not paying an OTA commission for someone who already knows you.

For that to work, your channel has to be good. It has to reply fast, even at 11 pm on a Saturday. It has to know your prices and your availability. No inquiry can fall through the cracks. And everything you know about each customer has to live somewhere safe, not in one employee's head or an OTA's inbox.

Why we built trama.

Yaco and I built trama. for exactly this. Today we work with 30+ tourism businesses: wineries and olive oil producers, experiences, adventure tourism, lodging, inbound operators and agencies.

We give you your own sales channel, with AI built in:

• An AI employee that covers your WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok and website around the clock. It asks the right questions, quotes with your prices and only offers the slots you've set up. Then it hands your team a sale that's ready to close.
• WhatsApp per salesperson: everyone on your team works from their own number, so returning customers message someone they already know.
• A CRM with every customer's history. That data belongs to you.
• Your own MCP: connect your ChatGPT or Claude and work with your own business data. This time the register opens for you.

Trying to beat Booking at its own game is a losing battle. Play on your home turf, where nobody charges you to sell to someone who already knows you.

That's trama.'s mission: give every small tourism business in LATAM a sales channel of its own, so they can stop paying a middleman every time someone who already knows them books again. The big players figured this out a while ago.

Your move.

Notes and sources

1. Hospitality Technology, "63% of Travelers Use AI to Research Trips. Here Is Why Hilton Refuses to Hand Over Checkout", October 6, 2026. Hilton rates in ChatGPT, Claude and Google, redirect to Hilton.com, Michael Leidinger's quote and 260 million members.
2. Booking.com for Developers, "About Booking.com Connector". The Claude connector doesn't book or charge.
3. PhocusWire, "Booking Holdings launches Vayo AI travel agent, plans $100M investment", October 14, 2026.
4. BNamericas, "Mercado Libre detalla su estrategia de IA y próximos pasos", February 25, 2026 (in Spanish; quote translated).
5. Booking.com for Partners, "Understanding Booking.com commission details". Commission depends on country, property type and agreement; Preferred Partner and Visibility Booster add commission.
6. Viator, "Viator Accelerate" and Viator Supplier Center. More commission in exchange for more visibility; commission varies by location.
7. trama., "Why ChatGPT recommends another travel agency instead of yours".
8. HOTREC, "Digital Trends in Accommodation: Hotels, Booking.com and DMA", July 2, 2024. Study of more than 3,000 European hotels.
9. Airbnb, "Airbnb service fees" and Airbnb, "Simplifying service fees". Single 15.5% fee (16% in Brazil and Mexico), 20% for experiences and the 100 to 84.50 dollar example.
10. Which?, "Why you're paying too much for your hotel", March 3, 2020. Typical commissions of 15% to 25%.
11. GetYourGuide, Supplier Terms & Conditions (October 2026), clause 4.1. Commission as a percentage of price, possible increases and confidentiality of the rate.
12. Arival, "Distribution channels to help you grow your tour business: OTAs", February 19, 2021 (guest article). Viator and GetYourGuide commission ranges.
13. trama., "Why every salesperson should have their own WhatsApp".
14. trama., "MCP: bring your travel agency's assistant into the AI you already use".