The economics of being a reseller dependent on major OTA platforms have been deteriorating for years across the travel trade — not dramatically, not with any single inflection point, but steadily. Agencies that built their business model around earning commissions from consumer-facing booking platforms have watched those commission rates compress or disappear, their client relationships intermediate, and their product knowledge become less relevant when algorithms handle the recommendation layer.
In Colombia, this pressure is particularly visible in cities like Bogotá, Medellín, and Cartagena, where a substantial tier of professional incoming agencies and regional tour resellers have been rethinking their supplier relationships. What's driving the shift isn't ideology — it's margin arithmetic and operational control.
What Changed in the OTA Commission Structure
Major consumer-facing OTAs in the tours and activities space typically operate on a net-to-operator model, where operators list at a price and the platform takes a distribution fee. For operators, this means accepting that the platform controls the end-consumer relationship, the cancellation flow, and the review ecosystem. For resellers who previously earned referral commissions from these platforms, the structural change has been more disruptive: most large OTAs have reduced or eliminated agency referral programs over the past several years as they've built direct-to-consumer flows that bypass the agency layer entirely.
The result for Bogotá agencies is that a channel that used to generate passive income through referral commissions now generates almost nothing — and competing with the OTA's own booking flow for clients the agency has already serviced is a losing position. Agencies are essentially pointing their clients toward a platform that then owns that client relationship going forward.
We're not saying OTA platforms are without value for operators or travelers. They serve a genuine discovery function for independent travelers who don't have agency relationships. We're saying that for professional travel agencies whose business model is built on curating supplier relationships and earning reseller margin, OTA dependence has become structurally misaligned with that model.
What Direct Supplier Relationships Actually Mean Operationally
When agencies in Colombia talk about "direct supplier relationships," they typically mean one of three things: direct bilateral commercial agreements with operators (paper contracts, agreed net rates, direct invoicing), membership in a B2B wholesale platform that gives them access to operator inventory without going through a consumer OTA, or some combination of both.
The difference from the OTA model is ownership of the commercial relationship. With a direct supplier agreement or a B2B platform, the agency controls its own markup and product curation. If they want to specialize in Andean trekking products and build a reputation with that client segment, they can negotiate with the best trekking operators in Peru and Colombia directly and build a catalog that reflects genuine expertise. The OTA model doesn't support this — it returns results based on ratings and popularity algorithms, not on the agency's curatorial judgment.
Agencies in Medellín and Cartagena that have made this shift consistently report that the operational burden is higher upfront — building supplier relationships, negotiating terms, managing invoicing — but that the margin quality is better and the client relationships are meaningfully stronger. When a client books through an agency that has a direct relationship with an operator, the agency can handle service issues, make requests on the client's behalf, and generally be more useful than they would be as an OTA referral link.
The Commission Comparison That Actually Matters
A common misconception is that OTA commissions and direct-supplier margins are comparable numbers. They're not structured to be comparable, because they represent different commercial positions.
An OTA referral fee, where it still exists, might be a 3–5% commission on a booking the OTA's algorithm drove to a click — the agency contributed minimal sales effort. A direct-supplier reseller margin, by contrast, is typically in the 15–25% range on net rates for day tours and 10–18% on multi-day products, reflecting the fact that the agency is doing the actual work of recommending, booking, and servicing the client.
The absolute dollar difference per booking is significant. More important is the business model difference: agencies earning reseller margins on products they actively recommend are in a fundamentally different position than agencies earning referral commissions for clicks that could just as easily come from a Google ad. The reseller model scales with the agency's sales effort. The referral model is structurally vulnerable to being disintermediated.
What Agencies Want From B2B Platform Infrastructure
Travel agencies in Colombia that have moved away from OTA dependence and toward direct supplier relationships aren't necessarily technophobic — many of them want platform infrastructure, just not infrastructure designed for consumers. What they need looks different from what major OTAs provide.
They need to see net rates, not retail prices. They need availability that's reliable enough to quote to clients without calling ahead to confirm. They need clear cancellation and amendment procedures that account for client-side changes. They need invoicing and payment flows that work with their existing business accounting. And they want to be able to build ongoing relationships with operator partners, not just transact with anonymous listings.
The gap between what major OTAs offer and what professional resellers actually need is where B2B-specific distribution infrastructure fits. The conversation in Bogotá and Medellín agencies isn't "should we leave OTAs?" — many already have for their B2B channel strategy. It's "what do we replace them with that gives us real supplier access and sustainable margin?"
The Geography Factor in Colombian Reseller Economics
One dynamic specific to the Colombian market is the degree to which regional expertise commands reseller value. An agency in Bogotá that has deep relationships with operators in the Caño Cristales region, the Pacific coast around Bahía Solano, or the Coffee Region around Manizales has a genuine competitive advantage over what any algorithmic OTA can offer for those destinations. The local knowledge and operator trust are real assets — but they only translate into business value when the agency has direct access to those operators' inventory.
This regional expertise dimension is part of why Colombian agencies are particularly active in seeking direct supplier relationships. The most interesting tour products in Colombia are often in destinations where OTA coverage is thin and where operator relationships matter enormously for operational reliability. The agency that knows an operator personally and can confirm a Caño Cristales tour with a WhatsApp message is providing something qualitatively different from an anonymous listing.
B2B distribution infrastructure that gives Colombian agencies structured access to operators across these regional markets — with reliable availability, transparent pricing, and documented product specs — is filling a gap that the major OTA model was never designed to address.
