The real math of OTA dependence and the case for direct

Every operator who has ever asked "makemytrip agent commission" or "traveltriangle commission for agents" into Google at 11 pm already knows the answer in their gut: it's a lot. What most haven't done is put a rupee number next to it and compare that number to what a direct booking actually costs to win.

That comparison is the entire argument in this post. Marketplaces take a cut that looks reasonable line by line: 20% here, 8% there. Add it up over a full month, though, and the picture changes. Compare what marketplace-sourced bookings actually cost you against a month of bookings that came from your own WhatsApp list, your Google Business Profile, or a referral, and the gap is usually bigger than operators expect, in both directions: OTAs cost more than they feel like, and direct is cheaper than most agencies believe, because they've never built the muscle to generate it.

This isn't an anti-OTA post. Marketplaces are a rational channel for a new agency with no reviews, or for filling a slow month. The strategic mistake isn't using them. It's being 100% dependent on them with zero owned audience of your own. Here's the machine, the math, and a year-long path to changing the ratio.

How the OTA machine actually works

Start with scale, because it explains everything else. MakeMyTrip reported record gross bookings of $9.8 billion in FY2025, up 30% year on year, and now holds more than 60% of India's OTA segment. Online travel agencies as a category account for roughly 65% of India's online gross booking value. When a customer opens their phone to book a trip, the odds are already stacked toward a marketplace before your agency ever enters the picture.

That dominance isn't just brand recall. It's contractual. In 2022 the Competition Commission of India fined MakeMyTrip-Goibibo ₹223 crore for abusing its market position through price-parity clauses: terms that barred hotels from selling rooms cheaper on any other channel, including their own website. The order has since been contested in appeals, so treat it as evidence of structural advantage rather than a settled last word. But the direction is clear: the platform used its size to lock in supply-side pricing, which is exactly the kind of leverage an individual agency cannot replicate.

None of this makes marketplaces predatory to work with. It makes them expensive, structurally, in ways that compound the longer you rely on them as your only channel.

What commissions actually look like, as of July 2026

Commission structures vary by category and by platform, and they move, sometimes within a single season. Here's the landscape as reported, as of July 2026. Confirm current terms in your own agent portal before you sign anything; none of these numbers are fixed by law.

Platform / category	Reported commission	Model
Hotel OTAs (India, general)	15-40%, plus 3-5% for visibility placement	Straight % of booking value
Viator	20-30%	% of booking value
GetYourGuide	20-30%	% of booking value
Klook	15-25%	% of booking value
Thrillophilia	Up to 30%, across 20,000+ listed experiences	% of booking value
TravelTriangle	Registration charge plus a reported minimum ~8% platform share per confirmed trip (VERIFY: official rate card isn't published)	Lead-gen: pay for leads/registration, share on conversion

The MakeMyTrip hotel-commission range is also a moving target within itself. During price wars, some hoteliers have reported effective commissions dropping from around 35% toward 18% as the platform competed for supply. At the other end, when commission asks have crept toward 40-45%, hotelier boycott threats have forced caps back down near 22%. Read that as a channel where your effective take rate depends on your negotiating leverage and the season, not a fixed toll.

The TravelTriangle-style lead-gen model works differently from a straight commission cut, and it's worth understanding separately because it's the one most small operators actually use. Agents on Trustpilot report registration charges and a minimum ~8% platform share per confirmed trip, with the platform advertising a roughly 25% lead-to-booking conversion rate. Treat the 8% and 25% figures as reported by agents and by the platform respectively, not as an official published rate card. Confirm the current agreement before you rely on it.

The blended CAC math

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is simply what it costs you, in rupees, to win one paying booking. For a marketplace, that's the commission you hand over on every confirmed trip. For a direct channel, it's whatever you spend on ads, tools, or time to generate that same booking. Put both on the same footing: cost per booking, in rupees and as a percentage of package value. Then the comparison stops being abstract.

Example: Say your average package sells for ₹50,000 and you run 20 bookings a month, split evenly between a hotel-style OTA charging a mid-range 25% commission and your own WhatsApp/Instagram/referral channel.

Marketplace side: 10 bookings × ₹50,000 × 25% = ₹1,25,000 handed to the platform. Your CAC per booking on this channel is ₹12,500: a quarter of the sale, gone before you've paid a single supplier.

Direct side: Say you spend ₹18,000 a month on a mix of Meta/Google ads and a part-time hour of content work, and that channel produces the other 10 bookings. Your CAC per booking is ₹1,800: roughly 3.6% of package value, not 25%.

Same 20 bookings, same revenue on paper. But the marketplace channel just cost you nearly seven times more per customer than the direct one, and you don't own a single one of those ten customer relationships once the trip ends.

That last line is the part operators underweight. A commission isn't just a cost. It's also the price of never being allowed to keep the customer's contact details, WhatsApp number, or repeat-booking intent in a form you control. The OTA owns that relationship. You rent the transaction.

Build your own version of this worksheet with your real numbers: your average package value, your actual commission rate on your busiest platform, your monthly ad/content spend, and your direct booking count. Two ratios matter: commission ₹ per booking, and direct spend ₹ per booking. Everything else is noise.

OTA tech weapons, and the ₹0 version of each

Marketplaces win partly on scale and partly on genuine product advantages. The honest version of "compete with MakeMyTrip" isn't matching their tech. You can't, and shouldn't try. It's building the low-cost equivalent of each weapon, aimed at the customers you've already earned.

Their weapon: retargeting. Every OTA tracks what you searched and re-shows it to you across apps for days. Your ₹0 version: a WhatsApp broadcast list of every past enquirer and traveller, segmented by destination interest, that you message with relevant departures. It costs nothing but discipline. See the economics of running WhatsApp broadcasts for what that actually looks like at scale.

Their weapon: dynamic pricing. Prices shift by demand, device, and time of day, optimised to extract maximum willingness to pay. Your version: negotiated, fixed-departure pricing that a client can lock in today and recommend to a friend tomorrow without the price moving underneath them. The fixed-departure break-even maths shows how to price these so they still protect margin.

Their weapon: review volume. Thousands of star ratings create instant trust for a stranger with no other signal. Your version: a Google Business Profile stacked with recent reviews and short video testimonials from real travellers. See how to actually build a Google Business Profile presence that does this work for a local search.

Their weapon: instant confirmation. Book at 11 pm, get a confirmed voucher in ten seconds. Your version: a payment link you can send inside a WhatsApp reply and a genuine five-minute response SLA during business hours. It costs nothing except answering the phone, and speed to lead is the single highest-leverage habit a small team can build.

None of these ₹0 versions beat the OTA's technology. They don't need to. They beat the OTA's relationship, because a customer who already trusts you doesn't need retargeting, dynamic pricing, review volume, or instant confirmation. They need to know you'll reply.

When the marketplace is genuinely the right call

Be fair to the channel. A brand-new agency with zero reviews and no search visibility has no faster way to get in front of a paying customer than a marketplace with existing traffic. The commission is effectively a customer-acquisition fee for borrowing someone else's trust while you build your own. Off-season fill is another legitimate case: a departure that would otherwise run empty, sold at marketplace economics, still beats an empty seat.

The failure mode isn't using marketplaces. It's using only marketplaces, indefinitely, past the point where you have enough reviews, repeat clients, and search presence to not need to.

A 12-month glide path to majority-direct

You don't switch off marketplaces on a chosen date. You starve them of relevance by building the direct channel underneath them, one booking at a time.

1. Months 1-2: capture everything. Every marketplace customer's WhatsApp number and email goes into your own contact list the moment a booking confirms, not after the trip. Whether that list lives in a spreadsheet or something purpose-built is a separate decision (see this Excel-versus-WhatsApp-CRM comparison if you're weighing it), but this capture habit is what makes everything below possible.
2. Months 2-4: turn confirmed trips into reviews. Ask every marketplace-sourced traveller for a Google review and, where possible, a 20-second video testimonial post-trip. This builds the trust asset an OTA rents you and takes it back under your name.
3. Months 3-6: start a WhatsApp broadcast habit. Segment your captured list by destination and season, and send one genuinely useful, non-spammy update a month: a new departure, a price lock, a real photo from a recent trip.
4. Months 5-8: run a small, consistent ad budget. Even ₹10,000-15,000 a month on Meta/Google, pointed at your best-converting package, starts compounding once your Google Business Profile and reviews are doing their job in the background.
5. Months 6-10: measure the ratio monthly. Track what share of bookings came from marketplace versus direct. The goal isn't zero marketplace. It's watching the ratio move.
6. Months 9-12: reprice marketplace listings deliberately. Once direct volume is reliable, you can afford to be choosier about which marketplace departures you still take, and at what commission you'll accept them.

By month 12, marketplaces should be a deliberate top-up channel for off-season fill and new-destination testing, not the only tap you have.

Common questions

Is buying travel leads in India actually worth it?

It depends on what you're buying and what you already have. If you have no reviews, no website presence, and no repeat client base, a lead platform's traffic is worth the commission. You're paying for access you haven't earned yet. If you already have a working Google Business Profile and a WhatsApp list, the same leads cost more than building your own funnel would, because you're now paying a premium for something you could generate for closer to ₹0.

Why do customers book on MakeMyTrip instead of a known local agent?

Mostly trust signals and convenience, not price. Instant confirmation, visible review counts in the thousands, and app-based retargeting all remove the uncertainty a first-time customer feels about handing money to a stranger. A local agency wins the same customer by replacing those signals with ones it can actually afford: a strong Google Business Profile, real testimonials, and a fast, human reply, not by trying to match the OTA's checkout speed.

How do you compete with MakeMyTrip as a small travel agent?

You don't compete on the same axis. MakeMyTrip wins on scale, price comparison, and instant booking; a small agency wins on relationship, local knowledge, and a level of service an app can't fake: a genuine answer to "will this itinerary actually work for my in-laws" at 9 pm. Compete where the app is structurally weak, not where it's structurally strong.

What does the travel agency business look like five years from now?

Nobody can say with certainty, but the direction of the numbers in this post is a reasonable guide: marketplaces will keep consolidating volume and commission leverage, and the agencies that survive well will be the ones with an owned audience they don't have to rent back every month. That doesn't mean marketplaces disappear from the mix. It means they stop being the whole business.

The short version

• MakeMyTrip alone holds 60%+ of India's OTA segment, and OTAs move roughly 65% of online booking value. The deck is stacked toward marketplaces before a customer ever finds you directly.
• Commission rates run 15-40% for hotel-style OTAs, 15-30% for experience platforms like Viator, GetYourGuide, Klook and Thrillophilia, and lead-gen platforms like TravelTriangle add registration charges plus a reported ~8% share per confirmed trip (unverified, confirm your agreement).
• Compute your own blended CAC: commission ₹ per booking on your busiest marketplace versus ad/content spend ₹ per booking on your direct channel. The gap is usually wider than it feels.
• Marketplaces are the right call for new agencies with no reviews yet and for filling off-season departures. The mistake is 100% dependence, not use.
• You can't out-tech an OTA's retargeting, dynamic pricing, or review volume, but a WhatsApp list, fixed-departure pricing, a strong Google Business Profile, and a five-minute reply SLA are the ₹0 equivalents that win the relationship instead.
• Capture every marketplace customer's contact into your own list the day they book. That single habit is what makes a glide path to direct possible at all.
• Track your marketplace-to-direct booking ratio monthly. Moving it, even slowly, is the actual goal, not shutting off marketplaces overnight.