Not Done Weekly is Back! - The OTA Duopoly Just Got Company.

It's been three months since I sent my last newsletter. Hope everyone had a nice summer.

I didn't run out of things to say. Anyone who knows me knows that's not physically possible. I went quiet because I've been building something, and the full story drops September 21 (here first). That's all I'm going to say about it today. Mark the date.

What I can talk about is the podcast. Season 3 of Not Done launches tomorrow, one year almost to the day after Episode 1. When I started Not Done, I didn't know if anyone would listen. It's now the #1 hospitality podcast in the country. Thank you for supporting our podcast by listening, engaging and sharing!

Season 3, Episode 1: The Guys Building Hotels at Airbnb

Andrea D'Amico and Lou Zameryka spent their careers at Booking.com. Now they run Hotels at Airbnb. Andrea leads the global hotels business out of San Francisco. Lou runs enterprise and connectivity partnerships out of New York. If Airbnb takes real share in hotels over the next five years, these are the two people who did it.

A few numbers from the conversation:

• 650 million user accounts. 90% of demand comes to Airbnb direct. You can hear me say "wow" out loud when Andrea drops that one, because the largest hotel loyalty program on earth is 300 million members (Marriott Bonvoy). Airbnb is at least twice that size.

• Q2 revenue up 17%, and hotel nights growing roughly 3x faster than the homes business — with hotels still a single-digit share of nights booked. That is a staggering amount of runway.

• 1.6 billion devices touched the platform last year.

• Zero master service agreements with the big brand families. So far. I asked Lou point blank if Marriott and Hilton deals are coming. His answer surprised me — and it wasn't "no."

• They would not tell me the take rate. But Brian Chesky called it "extremely favorable" on the Q2 earnings call, and I pushed them on what happens when Booking and Expedia are forced to respond. We played out the game theory on air.

We also got into why New York (yes, the city that regulated short-term rentals into the ground) now has more Airbnb hotel supply than almost anywhere, the 15% credit they're using to get travelers to try hotels, and what two guys who built the OTA duopoly would change about the hotel industry now that they've switched sides.

[Listen on Apple] | [Listen on Spotify] | [Watch on YouTube]

Making Hospitality Leaders Smarter On The Distribution Reset

For twenty years we've used the phrase "distribution mix" with a straight face. Let's be honest — it was never a mix. For most independents it's two OTAs, a website, and a prayer. I'm doing advisory work right now for an independent hotel in California where 60% of reservations come from Booking.com and Expedia. Combined. Call it whatever you want on the STAR report — that's a dependency.

That's finally changing. Here's the context in 60 seconds, then I'll give you the playbook.

What just happened: Airbnb dipped a toe in hotels in 2018 and bought HotelTonight in 2019, but the 2026 Summer Release was the real pivot — thousands of boutique and independent hotels across 20 launch destinations, explicitly excluding big chains, with a price-match guarantee and a 15% credit pushing 650 million users to try hotels. The scaled deals have started too: on August 4, Airbnb signed Lark Hotels — 75+ boutique properties across New England, Asheville, Nantucket, and the Hamptons. First domino.

Why it matters to your P&L: I wrote about Skift's "The Squeeze" in May. Brand fees ~10%, software ~2%, OTA-weighted distribution 4–7% — call it 16–19% of gross room revenue gone before you pay a housekeeper or a mortgage. Kalibri Labs has been screaming about this for years: guest acquisition costs run 15–25% of guest-paid revenue at the average hotel, and some properties are north of that. You can't control interest rates or insurance. You can control what your next booking costs you. A third scaled marketplace bidding for your inventory is the best structural news the independent owner has gotten in a decade — whether or not you ever list a single room on it.

Now the playbook. Four weeks, one move per week.

Week 1 — Find your real number. Pull twelve months of channel production and calculate net revenue per channel, not gross: room revenue minus commissions, transaction fees, and any wholesale or loyalty costs, by channel. Most owners have never seen their hotel this way, and most guess their OTA dependency low. Kalibri's data shows the spread you're looking for: 13–17% of room rate to acquire an OTA guest versus 3–8% direct. If you want to go deeper on the framework, their Book Direct Campaigns 2.0 report is free and still the best education on channel economics I know of. One number to walk away with: net RevPAR by channel. Manage to that, not gross.

Week 2 — Get connectivity-ready. Call your channel manager before you call Airbnb. Cloudbeds, Mews, SiteMinder and most of the majors are already plugged in through the Airbnb and HotelTonight APIs — SiteMinder's guide to Airbnb listing requirements is a good primer on how the connection actually works. Then handle the credibility layer Airbnb screens for: valid licenses, honest photography, disclosed amenities and restrictions. One warning from a guy who has read a thousand hotel listings: do not copy-paste your Expedia content. Airbnb merchandises story, not bullet points. Andrea told me on the episode that they put a human on every hotel's presentation to make sure the property's actual story comes through. Write yours like a host would — the bar your regulars love, the room with the weird view, the thing about your property nobody else can say.

Week 3 — Run it as an incrementality test, not a parity headache. List, then measure one thing for 90 days: are these guests new to you? Match Airbnb reservations against your PMS and CRM history. Track net ADR against your OTA net ADR — not gross against gross. Andrea told me their base skews young, affluent, and American; for a lot of independents that's a guest you currently have zero way to reach. And don't undercut your own direct channel to buy share — let Airbnb's 15% credit promotion be the discount.

Week 4 — Renegotiate and convert. Two moves. First, take your Week 1 numbers into your next OTA market-manager conversation. Every marketplace prices against its alternatives, and you just got one — that leverage exists even if your Airbnb production is small. Second, work the guests you've already paid for: capture the email at check-in, make the direct-booking offer at checkout. The math on repeat direct guests is the whole game — you paid an acquisition cost once; every return stay after that is nearly free demand.

And one thing to start now for 2027: the most interesting idea in the whole episode wasn't about rooms. Lou talked about a world where a travel app becomes something you open every day — where locals book your restaurant, your spa, your coffee bar through the same platform tourists use to book your beds. If that's even half right, the hotels that win the next five years are the ones whose ancillary inventory is digitized and bookable anywhere, not trapped in a PDF menu at the front desk. Get your F&B, spa, parking, and experiences into systems with APIs now. The platforms are coming for your services next, and this time you want to be easy to find. Your loss-leader outlets might finally become profit centers — but only if a machine can read them.

The Season 3 Lineup of Podcast:

September 1 — "The Duopoly Gets Company" Andrea D'Amico & Lou Zameryka, the leaders of Airbnb's global hotels business. Two Booking.com veterans who switched sides and are now building hotels the Airbnb way. 650 million user accounts. Zero big-brand deals. Yet. Drops tomorrow.

September 15 — "The Numbers Don't Flinch" Jan Freitag, National Director of Hospitality Analytics, and Isaac Collazo, VP of Analytics, CoStar. The two guys behind the data every one of us quotes in every owner meeting, together on one mic. No spin, no vibes — where this market actually stands heading into 2027.

September 22 — "Under New Management" Sloan Dean, interviewed by Pam Chen-Dean, Co-Founder & Chief of Staff. The tables turn. My wife, Producer and now Chief of Staff puts me in the guest chair and asks the questions everyone's been asking me for three months — including the ones I've been dodging. This is the episode where I finally tell you what I've been building. September 22.

September 29 — "Resetting the Table" Danny Meyer, Founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack. We recorded a few days ago and I'm still thinking about it. His episode drops the same day his new book What Could Possibly Go Right? hits shelves. Setting the Table is my favorite business book ever written. Twenty years later, the master returns to the subject. Personal one for me.

October 13 — "Aimbridge: Take Two" Craig Smith, CEO of Aimbridge Hospitality. Last season we talked about the years we spent competing against each other. This time we go deeper — what's actually happening inside the world's largest third-party manager, and where this industry's operating model goes next.

And still to come in Season 3:

• Reggie Aggarwal — Founder & CEO, Cvent

• Ariane Gorin — CEO, Expedia Group

• Drew Pinto — EVP & Chief Revenue & Technology Officer, Marriott International

Cheers,
Sloan