You are paying commission on demand you already generated

Every operator who sells through an aggregator has made the same calculation. The commission hurts, but the volume is real, so the commission gets paid.

The calculation is usually wrong, because it assumes the aggregator brought you the customer. Often the aggregator was the customer's second choice, and you were the first.

Follow the actual sequence

A buyer searching for what you sell will frequently find you directly. They land on your site, or they call, or they start a booking. Then one of three things happens.

• They fill in a form and hear nothing for several hours.
• They start a booking, hit a step that needs a question answered, and there is nobody to answer it.
• They call outside hours and reach nothing.

In all three cases they go back to the results page and book through the aggregator, who answers instantly and never leaves them wondering. You then pay a commission on a customer who had already chosen you.

The measurement problem

This is invisible in most reporting, because the direct channel only counts what completed. The enquiry that started and stopped does not appear anywhere. So the aggregator looks like a source of new demand rather than what it often is, which is a recovery mechanism for your own leaks, priced at fifteen to thirty percent.

The first useful thing to do is not to spend more on marketing. It is to find out how many direct attempts you already get and how many of them finish.

Closing the leak

Three changes recover most of it, and none of them require touching your pricing or your aggregator relationships.

• Answer immediately, at any hour. Not a promise to respond, an actual answer. Speed is the entire competitive advantage the aggregator has over you.
• Recover the abandoned booking. Someone who got three steps in and stopped is the warmest enquiry you will see all week. Most operators never contact them again.
• Handle the blocking question. Usually a small set of questions stops most incomplete bookings. Answer them at the point they arise rather than in a help page.

The arithmetic

Shifting a modest share of bookings from the aggregator to your own channel goes almost entirely to margin, because the demand already existed and the commission simply stops being paid.

That is normally a better return than the same effort spent chasing new demand, and it is considerably cheaper to test.

This is the exact pattern we see most in transport and logistics, where direct bookings compete against aggregators every single day.