Before the buildings, I ran a tour operator and destination management company. We filled other people's hotels. Then I spent a decade on the other side, developing and operating our own.
Very few people have sat in both chairs, and it shows in how the two sides argue.
What the intermediary is actually optimising
An operator looks at a booking through a channel and sees a commission. A number taken off the top of a night they believe they would have sold anyway.
The intermediary is not thinking about that night at all. They are thinking about filling a coach, or a group, or a period nobody else wants, and they are pricing the risk of holding inventory they might not sell. When they push hard on rate, it is usually because they have committed to volume and now have to move it.
You can negotiate much better once you know which of those two situations you are in.
What the operator forgets
The channel is not just demand. It is demand at a time you did not have any.
I have sat in operator meetings where the entire discussion was reducing intermediated share, with no discussion of which nights that share was actually filling. Cut a channel that fills your Tuesdays in February and you will feel it in February, not in the commission line.
Look at intermediated business by night, not in aggregate. The picture usually changes.
Where both sides go wrong
The intermediary treats the room as interchangeable. The operator treats the guest as theirs by right. Neither is true.
The useful question is which nights each side genuinely creates rather than captures, and that is answerable with the data both of them already have. It just requires someone willing to look at it without a position to defend, which is rarer than it sounds.
Why this matters more now
Direct booking got cheaper to build and harder to fill. The tools are commodity. Attention is not.
Operators who understand what the intermediary is solving for negotiate better and cut smarter. Operators who treat every commission as a leak end up with a lower cost of sale and an emptier building.