139 - Global OTA Distribution Chart
How do find out where you should distribute your hotel. Perfect design is not special anymore. Expedia's pivot. What was big at CES this year?
Hello,
Another week, another newsletter. The new protocol for AI and commerce released by Google and Shopify this week was quite interesting. But I do realize that this just throws all the roadmaps out the window and at one point the tech companies need to prioritize. Still an interesting overview included below. Lots of news this week, took a bit to filter through it all. Have a great read.
Best, Martin
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UCP: The new Acronym of AI and commerce
Last week Google and Shopify release a new protocol for commerce management with AI. A lot has been written about it. Just like MCP was a big deal a few weeks ago, this will probably be a big deal soon. I don’t envy the tech companies who will either shrug this off and say we’ll wait to see where the cards land. And appear as old-school cynics. Or who need to invest in building against the new protocols that might not workout. But, hotel and travel distribution are THE pioneers of e-commerce. We should be testing this.
DISTRIBUTION INFRASTRUCTURE AND AI + FOLLOW THE UCP NEWS⁺
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. CES The recaps
Some good recaps of CES, from a hotel point of view and from tech point of view. Robots seemed to have been the theme. Personally I think we’re still a decade away from having them clean rooms, but that’s a just a feeling. There is a lot of non-robot work that can already start. Still, let’s not forget that hotels traditionally were the showcase for new tech. Would be cool to bring some of that back in smart ways.
CES 2026 FANCOURT + CES 2026 SINOFSKY
Design, Chatbots, Emotions & AI
Discovery increasingly ends with answers, but lifestyle hotels and luxury need to show a vibe. If search and commerce happens within the chatbots, the “vibes” happen on Tiktok and Instagram. How does this all come together? Where is the website going to be? With the easy access to AI generated images and videos, where does trust come in about the hotel? So many questions I don’t have the answer to, but they do require a bit of thought.
NEW DESIGN FOR TRAVEL + PERFECT DESIGN IS DEAD
The Fake brand - Understanding AI Indexing
So far there’s mostly random advice on how to get indexed in the AI space. Most of the GEO and AEO tips are opinions. But here’s a really interesting test, someone created a fake brand and studied how it got picked up by the AI bots and in the results. The idea of doing a fake brand is excellent because at least one can be sure where the information is coming from as one controls the entire information flow.
FAKE BRAND GROWTH + MINDSET OF FUTURE OF SEARCH
Everything Is TV… but
AI is pushing media in two opposite directions at once. On the surface, everything becomes a stream of entertainment, just like TV (Instagram, Tiktok, Linkedin, maybe your inbox too). Underneath, automation strips cost out of entire industries. And because everything becomes so easy to access, more people use it and demand goes up. A bit like low cost flights increased travel.
MEDIA TRANSFORMATION
Expedia’s Quiet Reinvention
Expedia seems to be pivoting toward infrastructure rather than pure consumer branding and it is paying off. Wholesale growth and regulatory positioning give it room Booking.com lacks in Europe. Interestingly this goes down the path of OTAs becoming the plumbing for travel booking. With AI taking parts of discovery this is a possibility.
EXPEDIA STRATEGY
State of Social Media in Travel 2026
Social platforms now sit directly in the decision (and discovery) loop. Visual search, conversational discovery, and creator trust shape intent earlier than ever. The report makes one thing clear: authenticity has become a commercial advantage. Polished but empty content no longer converts.
TRAVEL SOCIAL MEDIA
Travel Trend Reports Overload
There are more trend reports than ever, but fewer real insights. The proposed matrix helps separate data-heavy noise from meaningful interpretation. Insight leadership requires synthesis, not volume. Curation is becoming a skill. And AI isn’t able to do it all.
TRAVEL TRENDS
Why Brands Target Travelers
Rory Sutherland’s post is worth a read, an outside view on travel, in he he says, travelers are unusually open to new ideas and purchases. This makes them a powerful audience beyond travel itself. Expedia’s offsite advertising tools formalize what marketers have long suspected. Context matters as much as intent.
TRAVEL AUDIENCE
When Nobody’s Watching: Reliability Wins
Automation failures (not even mentioning AI failures) often go unseen until they quietly erode trust and margins. Hotels need boring systems that work every time. An interesting study that automation and AI might be flashy but the reliability of the system is way more valuable the innovation. (A bit like Toyota vs French cars).
AUTOMATION ROI⁺
Opinion
Great Distribution Starts with finding the Right Guests
When I ran a hotel, we hit a moment where we needed to grow distribution. Our channel manager has this cool thing (now called a marketplace) where there was many distributors and we could click to add.
Dozens of potential distributors. Some I had heard of. Most I hadn’t. It felt like someone had emptied a bucket of logos onto our screen. There was no guidance. No indication of size, strength, geography, or fit. And some people saying they knew this one and thought that one was strong in __ market.
So we started adding them, but it really felt random.
I still believe more distribution is better than less, but there are better ways to do it. We didn’t know where to focus.
That’s why I think the new global distribution chart and Google Sheet dataset just published by the 10 Minutes News team is such a useful tool. It shows where the big players are actually big. Japan has its own ecosystem. So does India. The US might be Expedia/Booking territory, but beyond that, the world looks very different. These aren’t side players, they’re massive - many of them a lot larger than the big ones in the media.
But just adding distribution isn’t really a smart way. Following the idea on how to find a hotel USP (survey only the happiest guests), we applied that to our distribution. We saw that our reviews from UK guests were consistently strong. They liked our property, they understood our offer, and they tended to book again.
Conversely, we noticed that guests from Japan weren’t rating us as well. Different expectations, maybe we weren’t equipped to meet them yet (we didn’t have anyone who spoke the language which is a bad start). So pushing into the Japanese market before fixing those issues would’ve just made things worse.
So I agreed with the 10 Minutes team to release the dataset not just the infographic. And I think that’s quite a great help for everyone. The simple tip is start with the biggest platforms for the markets you already have good reviews in. Use only the best reviews as a guide.
The chart isn’t perfect, China is notably absent, and a few data points feel debatable. If you see something missing or off, leave a comment. The team is updating it, and your feedback makes it better.
• Free AI Courses from Google - Link
• 109 Rules of Storytelling - Link
• The Global Hotel Supply in 2025 - Link⁺
Did you know?: The word "art" comes from the Latin "ars" which means skill, craft, or method. It later entered Old French as "art" and Middle English as "art," keeping similar meanings, referring to skills in various crafts and creative activities. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺