Hotels and OTAs

A comment on the article "Hotels - You're losing to Shatner and a Gnome"

It's true that hotels loose a lot of money because their customers are booking the rooms on OTAs. On the one hand and it's easier for the hotels to put their available rooms on OTAs because the OTAs have to manage the whole website but on the other hand they have to pay commissions which are really high. To avoid the commissions the hotels have to be able to redirect their potential customers on their hotel website. The problem is that a lot of hotels don't have a good homepage or the homepage is not reallt attractive or cannot be found via google. The hotels have to create a unique homepage with a unique style where customers like to book their rooms and where they can find more information than on the OTAs. Some hotels fear that if they won't be present on the OTAs they would lose a lot of customers and could not compete against the other hotels. They are completely right because today customers prefere to go on OTAs, but if we take the example of the hotel in Columbia (USA) which during one year was not present on any OTAs and had the same occupancy rate after one year we can see that it's possible for hotels to avoid OTAs.