There is a number that makes most accommodation owners uncomfortable when they actually calculate it. It’s the percentage of their annual revenue that flows through Airbnb, Booking.com or similar platforms — and the commission that goes with it.

For many properties in Portugal, that number sits between 60% and 85% of all bookings. At commission rates that have crept steadily upward over the past decade and now frequently exceed 18%, that’s a significant and growing structural cost — one that most operators have accepted as an immovable fact of doing business.

It isn’t immovable. But reducing it requires strategy, patience and a different way of thinking about what a booking actually is.

How the dependency was built

The growth of OTAs in Portugal has been rapid and, in the early years, genuinely beneficial. Platforms like Airbnb opened international markets to small properties that had no way of reaching them independently. The distribution came with discovery — being listed meant being found by people who would never have heard of you otherwise.

The problem is that the relationship was never designed to be a partnership between equals. OTAs make money on every booking, which means their incentive is to own as much of the booking relationship as possible — including the guest’s identity, their loyalty, and their next reservation.

Over time, many accommodation businesses built their entire commercial structure around OTA traffic. No direct booking website worth the name. No email list. No strategy for returning guests. No brand presence beyond a profile page on someone else’s platform.

That’s not distribution — that’s dependency.

What the numbers look like in practice

Let’s make this concrete. A property generating €120,000 in annual accommodation revenue, with 75% of bookings through OTAs at an average commission of 17%, is paying approximately €15,300 per year in platform fees.

That’s before accounting for the price parity clauses that prevent the property from offering better rates directly, the algorithm dynamics that require constant rate management to maintain visibility, and the guest data that the platform owns and the property doesn’t.

Shifting even 20 percentage points of bookings to direct channels — at zero commission cost — would recover approximately €4,000 of that figure annually. For most small and medium accommodation businesses in Portugal, that’s a meaningful number.

What direct booking strategy actually requires

The shift toward direct bookings is not complicated in principle. It is, however, consistent effort in areas that feel less immediate than managing today’s calendar.

A direct booking website that works. Not a page that technically exists but a website that loads quickly, shows the property honestly and makes booking easy on a mobile phone. This is the most basic requirement and the one most frequently done badly.

A reason to book direct. Price parity clauses limit how much you can discount directly, but there are other incentives — early check-in, a welcome bottle of local wine, flexibility on cancellation — that cost little and shift the calculus for guests who are considering it.

Guest data captured and used. Every guest who books, regardless of channel, should leave with a reason to come back and a way for the property to reach them again. An email collected at check-in, a follow-up message with a direct booking link for their next stay — these are simple steps with compounding returns over time.

Presence in the channels that drive direct behaviour. Social media, Google My Business, a basic content strategy — these are not glamorous, but they are what makes a property findable when a guest who had a great experience wants to book again without going through a platform.

The long game

Reducing OTA dependency is not a project with a clear end date — it’s a shift in how an accommodation business thinks about its commercial relationships. The properties that have done it successfully in Portugal didn’t abandon the platforms. They used them more strategically, as an acquisition channel for new guests, while building the infrastructure to keep those guests in a direct relationship.

That distinction — OTAs as acquisition, direct as retention — is the model that works. And getting there starts with understanding exactly where you are right now.

If you run an accommodation business in Portugal and want to understand your current channel mix, what it’s actually costing you and what a realistic path toward better margins looks like, that’s work I do. Start with the conversation.