Hotels thought they had found the exit. After twenty years of watching Expedia and Booking.com extract commission on guests who were always theirs to begin with, the industry spotted a way out. Travelers were asking ChatGPT where to stay. Perplexity was recommending properties. Google’s AI Overviews were naming resorts by name. No commission line item. No rate parity clause. No visible intermediary standing between the hotel and the guest.
NB: This is an article from Americas Great Resorts
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They’d been here before. Commission is a symptom. Demand origin displacement is the disease.
AI does not have to become another OTA to create the same structural dependency. It only has to become the place where traveler preference forms before the hotel ever sees the guest.
That is the mechanism. Not the commission line. The origin point.
In 2015, Shopify was the merchant’s answer to Amazon.
The pitch was clean: stop renting shelf space from a platform that owns your customer relationship, controls your pricing, and competes with your own products. Build your own store. Own your own demand. Keep your margin.
Hundreds of thousands of merchants bought into the promise. Shopify’s revenue grew from $205 million in 2015 to $7.1 billion by 2023. The independence narrative was real enough to build an industry around it.
Customer acquisition proved harder.
Shopify merchants discovered that building a store was easy. Finding customers was not. So they bought Google ads. Then Meta ads. Then they plugged into Shop Pay, into the Shop app, into discovery surfaces controlled by platforms they did not own. Then OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, starting with direct transactions for Etsy sellers and announced Shopify merchant integration – making discovery, recommendation, and transaction part of the same interface.
The merchant escaped Amazon.
And arrived at a structurally similar dependency.
Not because every new platform charged the same toll. Because every new platform moved the decisive moment farther from the merchant. The store was owned. The customer path was not. Discovery stayed outside.
The hotel industry is repeating the arc. The arrival of AI discovery hasn’t changed the diagnosis. The question was never which platform delivers the guest. The question is where demand originates – and who controls that origin point.
