Every small business that trades reach for control is making a bet as old as the marketplace itself: that a bigger audience is worth whatever price gets extracted from the relationship later, once the party on the other side has enough leverage to name it. Hotels ran that bet to its conclusion in real time, in full view, over twenty years. In the early 2000s, independent hotels started listing on the platforms that would become Expedia and Booking.com. The leads were real, the guests were real, and the math looked fine: pay a commission, fill a room that would otherwise sit empty.
Two decades later, hospitality industry research routinely puts standard OTA commissions in the 15 to 25 percent range, sometimes higher for smaller properties with less negotiating leverage. Hotels have spent the better part of fifteen years running “book direct” campaigns, offering their own loyalty perks and lower rates. They’re trying to claw back a relationship they gave away one listing at a time.
Nobody signed up for that outcome. Each individual decision to list on a platform made sense in the year it was made.
The same curve, earlier
Moving and relocation marketplaces are running the identical early chapters right now. The escalation is documentable across three of them: Moving.com shows a customer up to four competing movers per enquiry, Sirelo shows up to five, Relocately shows up to six. That’s not a coincidence of platform design. It’s the same mechanism hotels lived through: more competing options on a page increase the platform’s leverage over everyone listed on it, and push price to the front of a decision that once included more than price.
Commission structures in this category haven’t been published the way hotel OTA commissions eventually were, so there’s no single number to cite here. What’s visible is the shape of the curve, and the shape is the point. Hotels didn’t lose their industry to OTAs by making one bad decision. They lost ground gradually, while the leads kept arriving and the math kept looking fine, right up until the aggregate cost of the relationship became visible only in hindsight.
What that curve looks like on the page itself is simple. A comparison grid ranks movers by price or response speed by default, with review scores as a secondary filter. Years in business or crew training don’t factor in at all, unless an operator pays to feature them. A customer scanning six quotes in a browser tab spends most of that attention on which number is lowest, not which company handled a piano move without a scratch three years ago. The layout isn’t hostile to any single operator. It’s optimized for the platform’s own conversion rate, which rewards whichever design gets a form submitted fastest.
Why the flat commission number understates what happened
The 15 to 25 percent figure hides the detail that explains the damage: the commission rate barely needed to move for the total cost to turn serious. What moved was the share of bookings running through the channel.
Picture a mid-sized independent hotel listing on an OTA at 18 percent commission, the middle of the trade-press range above. In its first year on the platform, the OTA might account for 10 percent of the hotel’s room-nights, mostly last-minute fill for rooms that would otherwise have gone empty. At that share, the commission costs the hotel roughly 1.8 percent of total revenue: a rounding error next to the extra occupancy it bought.
That 10 percent share rarely stays at 10 percent. Guests who book through the platform once tend to search it again for their next trip, because the reviews, the loyalty points, and the price-comparison habit all live on the platform’s side of the relationship now, not the hotel’s. Five years in, that same hotel might be sourcing 40 percent of its room-nights through the OTA at the same 18 percent rate. The rate never changed. The bill did: 40 percent of revenue at an 18 percent commission works out to 7.2 percent of total revenue, four times the original cost, without a single renegotiation.
This is a modeled illustration built on the commission range already cited above, not a published case study of a named property. The mechanism it illustrates holds regardless of the exact figures: a flat commission rate compounds with channel share, and channel share moves quietly while everyone watches the rate.
Moving marketplaces are built to produce the same compounding. A customer who requests four, five, or six quotes through a comparison page has just spent the one interaction that would normally build brand memory on the platform’s interface, not any single mover’s. The next time that household, or a friend of theirs, needs to move, they remember the platform and search there again. Share grows the way it grew for hotels: not because any single fee went up, but because the habit of starting the search on the platform got reinforced one transaction at a time.
The lock-in that hasn’t arrived yet
Hotels didn’t just lose share gradually. At various points, standard OTA contracts included rate-parity clauses: terms barring a hotel from advertising a lower price on its own site than the price listed on the platform. These weren’t rare or short-lived. Booking.com ran a version of the clause in Germany from 2013 until the country’s competition regulator ordered it dropped in 2015, and in December 2025 a Berlin regional court found Booking.com liable to compensate more than a thousand German hotels for the years the clause stayed in force, ruling that it had breached EU competition law. But for years the practical effect was direct: a hotel’s own website could not legally beat the commission-bearing listing on price. That meant a cheaper direct channel wasn’t just slow to build. It was contractually blocked.
Nothing published shows a moving marketplace using an equivalent clause today. But the incentive behind one is identical: a platform that owns the comparison moment benefits every time an operator’s own price can’t visibly beat the platform’s listing. A platform with enough leverage over enough operators eventually has the option to write that requirement into its terms, the way hotel OTAs did once independent hotels had nowhere else to source bookings. The absence of a rate-parity clause in this category today isn’t evidence the mechanism can’t happen here. It’s evidence the industry hasn’t yet reached the point where a platform has enough leverage to need one.
“A hotel guest comes back. A moving customer doesn’t.”
A real difference separates the two industries: most households move once every five to seven years, and plenty of movers never see the same customer twice in a career. Hotels can build a loyalty program because the same traveler books again next quarter. A mover generally can’t, because the next quote from that household is years away, if it ever arrives at all.
It means the exact playbook hotels eventually used (point systems, member rates, app-only perks) doesn’t transfer directly to moving. But the difference doesn’t break the parallel. It changes what the direct channel has to be built on.
Hotels rebuilt direct demand around the individual guest returning. Movers have to rebuild it around something else: the people around that one customer. A move is one of the more socially visible events in a household’s calendar. Neighbors notice the truck. Friends hear about the relocation before it happens. The customer who had a good experience gets asked “who did you use” by someone else within the year, not within a decade. Referral and reputation, not repeat purchase, are the moving industry’s version of the loyalty program. They build a channel a marketplace can’t easily insert itself into, because the recommendation happens between two people who already trust each other, off the platform entirely.
When operators treat their reviews, their referral flow, and their own site as an afterthought behind the marketplace lead queue, they’re skipping the one asset that played this exact structural role for hotels. It’s slower to build than a marketplace listing. It also can’t be bought back at 20 percent commission once it’s gone.
The review sitting on a marketplace profile carries the same risk as the booking itself: who actually earned that review rarely stays with the business that did the work.
What actually happened, and what didn’t
Hotels didn’t disappear. The good ones are still full. What changed is who owns the customer relationship at the moment of booking, and how much of every dollar hotels now pay for someone else to hold that position. Direct-booking campaigns work, but they work slowly, against a platform with a decade’s head start and a much bigger marketing budget than any single property.
That’s the part worth sitting with before the moving industry finishes writing its own version of this decade. The fix isn’t refusing to appear on marketplaces; hotels that tried that mostly lost bookings without gaining anything back. The fix is for a business to build a demand channel of its own while continuing to use the marketplace, so the platform becomes one channel among several rather than the only door customers walk through.
What a demand channel is made of
“Build your own channel” is easy to say and vague enough to ignore. For a hotel, it eventually meant a fast, mobile-friendly booking engine on its own site, rate parity with the OTA listing so the direct price was never the worse deal, a loyalty program with a real discount attached, and a marketing budget aimed at past guests instead of new search traffic. Most independent properties spent years assembling that list, mostly because they started building it only after the dependency was already severe.
For a mover, the equivalent list looks different but isn’t shorter: a quote tool on the company’s own site fast enough to compete with a marketplace comparison page, a review capture process that puts finished jobs on the mover’s own domain instead of leaving them stranded on a lead-seller’s profile, a follow-up sequence for past customers timed to when their contacts are statistically likely to be moving, and a referral offer specific enough that a past customer remembers to mention it. None of this replaces marketplace leads on day one. All of it decides whether, five years from now, that operator is the 10-percent-share hotel from the model above or the 40-percent-share one.
Run that five-year model forward with two operators instead of one hotel, both starting from the same marketplace lead flow in year one. Operator A takes every marketplace lead that arrives and builds nothing alongside it. By year five, marketplace-sourced jobs might be 40 percent of the business. Each job pays whatever the platform’s lead fee has become by then. Operator A has no owned list of past customers to fall back on if that fee rises again. Operator B takes the identical marketplace leads in year one but reinvests part of the margin from them into an owned quote tool, a review page, and a standing referral offer starting that same year. By year five, if even a third of Operator B’s jobs come from repeat contacts, referrals, or organic search rather than the marketplace, that operator can walk away from a bad marketplace renegotiation that Operator A cannot. Same starting point, same leads in year one, a materially different position in year five, purely from where the second and third years of margin got reinvested.
Most movers already see this risk. What they haven’t had is the tooling to close the gap: an owned quote flow, review infrastructure, and follow-up automation. Building that historically required either a marketing budget or a development team, and a business running a fleet and a crew schedule doesn’t have the spare hours to manage either one. That’s a capability gap, not a willpower gap, which is why this argument ends at a platform decision rather than a to-do list.
Check the calendar, not the lead count
The clearest tell in the hotel story wasn’t the commission rate. It was the calendar. Properties that started building a direct channel in year two of their OTA relationship spent the next decade in a genuinely stronger position than the ones that waited until year twelve, by which point the platform already held most of their booking history, their reviews, and their customers’ habit of searching there first.
Moving marketplaces are still young enough that most operators are somewhere in year two through year five of their own version of that timeline: early enough that building a direct channel alongside the marketplace leads costs relatively little, and early enough that most competitors haven’t started either. That window doesn’t stay open on its own schedule. It closes at the same pace the hotel one did, one listing, one habit, one repeat search at a time, and it closes fastest for the operators who never checked what year they were in.
Movaros builds the direct channel before the habit sets in.
Building on shared infrastructure gives a business its own quote tool, review capture and follow-up system years earlier than building it alone.
