@hl I'll try to keep it somewhat coherent 🤣
One of the main reasons why the OTA (online travel agent - Expedia, Travelocity, Booking, etc) avoids sending your contact information to the property is because they want to keep the revenue. For a while, hotels got in the habit of directly contacting people that booked via an OTA and offered them incentives if they booked with the hotel directly.
This would result in the OTA losing the booking and more importantly, missing out on their "overrides" - also known as the performance-based bonuses the major hotel distribution networks set for driving traffic through them... since those networks also get a cut.
There isn't just one feed for a hotel listing - there are multiple engines that most of the OTAs use. It is essentially like an ad engine - the OTA takes in multiple feeds for inventory, dedupes the listings, and then based on a slew of metrics decides which feed to book the room through.
Some of those metrics are "which feed are we closest to hitting our override volume with"
So there is a lot of incentive for the OTAs to keep you locked in to their booking and not allow the hotel to know who you are. It is why the email and phone number are usually associated with the OTA when you first go to check in..
As for why the web experience sucks - that's just corporate America being corporate America. the people with the understanding of how things should work are not the ones making the decisions
Sep 23, 2026, 7:38 PM
