The industry is celebrating a recovery it didn’t earn. Beneath the record passenger numbers, a structural fragility has quietly deepened and almost no one is talking about it.
The illusion of recovery
Global air travel has surpassed pre-pandemic peak levels. Hotels in major markets are posting record revenue per available room. Business travel is cautiously back. If you read the industry headlines, the story is triumphant: demand recovered, the sector survived, and the worst is behind us.
That narrative is not wrong. It is incomplete. Demand recovering tells you that people want to travel. It tells you almost nothing about who captures the value when they do, or whether the companies that move travelers through the system actually control their own commercial destiny.
The fixation on demand is understandable. For two years, empty aircraft and shuttered properties were an existential threat. But the reflex to measure recovery in passenger numbers and occupancy rates has allowed a quieter problem to compound: the travel industry, at nearly every layer, has grown more dependent on a concentrated set of intermediaries, platforms, and technology providers. Volume is up. Leverage is down.
The dependency problem
Consider distribution. Airlines have spent the better part of a decade announcing their intention to own the customer relationship directly, to reduce reliance on global distribution systems and move toward modern retailing under NDC. Progress exists. But in most markets, the majority of managed travel still routes through the same legacy pipes. The shift is slower than the announcements suggest, and in many markets it has barely begun. The structural dependence on GDS intermediaries remains, and with it, the cost structure and content constraints that carriers have been trying to escape.
Hotels face a version of the same problem that is arguably more advanced. The major OTAs now command customer acquisition costs that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Direct booking initiatives have yielded partial results, but the gravitational pull of the platforms, the search visibility, the loyalty programs, the interface, keeps independent properties and even major chains funneling a disproportionate share of their bookings, and their margin, through intermediaries they do not control.
Customer acquisition dependency is increasingly the central issue. Google’s dominance in travel search has created a toll road between intent and transaction. Paid search costs have risen steadily as the major OTAs, airlines, and metasearch platforms compete for the same clicks. A company can grow its booking volume substantially while watching its customer acquisition cost rise in lockstep, a treadmill that looks like growth but is really a transfer of margin to the platform.
Beneath all of this sits a technology dependency that rarely gets named directly. Critical infrastructure, pricing engines, booking systems, payment rails, fraud prevention, content distribution, is increasingly concentrated in a small number of vendors. For many airlines and hotels, switching costs are prohibitive. The commercial relationship with a core technology provider is less a vendor contract and more a structural dependency. These vendors hold significant negotiating leverage, and they know it.
Why dependency is more dangerous than a demand shock
A demand crisis is painful and often catastrophic in the short term. But it is, by nature, temporary. When Covid-19 grounded the global aviation fleet, it was devastating, but it was also an external shock. Demand returned, broadly, in the shape that industry analysts expected. The recovery, while uneven, followed a recoverable path.
Structural dependency does not recover in the same way. It compounds. Each year that an airline routes the majority of its premium cabin sales through a GDS it cannot fully influence is a year of margin compression and data opacity. Each year that a hotel grows its OTA-sourced bookings without a credible direct channel is a year of deepening price parity obligations and weakening customer ownership. The power imbalance is not static; it tends to favor the intermediary more with each cycle, because the intermediary is investing in the capabilities that make it harder to displace.
Demand fluctuation is a weather event. Dependency is a geological shift. One you prepare for; the other reshapes the terrain.
Strategic implications
For airlines, the implication is not simply to push harder on NDC adoption. The deeper question is whether the commercial architecture being built around modern retailing actually transfers ownership back to the carrier, or whether it recreates the same dependency pattern in a new technical wrapper. Owning the offer format is not the same as owning the customer relationship. Airlines that conflate the two will find themselves, a decade from now, dependent on a different set of intermediaries at a different layer of the stack.
For hotels, the math is stark. The value of a loyalty member who books direct, in lifetime revenue, in data richness, in the ability to price and package without intermediary constraint, dwarfs the value of an OTA booking at comparable rates. The investment case for direct capability is strong. What is often missing is the institutional commitment to treat distribution strategy as a board-level concern rather than a revenue management function.
For traveltech companies, the irony is that many are simultaneously enabling independence for their clients while building their own dependency risk into those same clients’ operations. A technology provider whose product becomes deeply embedded in a carrier’s commercial infrastructure is creating switching costs in both directions. The companies that recognize this, and build toward open, interoperable architectures, will be better positioned to hold relationships as the industry’s center of gravity shifts.
The Africa dimension
Nowhere is this dynamic more consequential, or more open to a different outcome, than in Africa. The continent’s aviation and hospitality sectors are growing, unevenly but genuinely, from a lower base. A set of structural decisions made in the next five years will determine whether African carriers and hotel groups build distribution infrastructure they own, or whether they scale into the same dependency patterns that are now constraining their counterparts in more mature markets.
The opportunity is real. Mobile-first payment infrastructure, growing domestic travel demand, and the absence of deeply embedded legacy distribution relationships create conditions that do not exist in Europe or North America. A carrier launching or scaling a direct digital channel today does not have decades of GDS contractual inertia to navigate. A hotel group building its direct booking capability now is not fighting to reclaim share from an intermediary that already owns the customer relationship.
But the risk is also real and accelerating. The major global distribution players, the dominant OTA platforms, and the large technology vendors are all investing in African market presence. The window in which African travel companies can make foundational choices about their distribution architecture, on their own terms, is open. It will not remain open indefinitely.
The travel companies that will matter in ten years are not those that grew fastest during the demand recovery. They are the ones that understood, during this window, that distribution is not a cost center. It is the competitive terrain. Companies that don’t control their distribution are not scaling. They are becoming dependent. And dependency, unlike a demand shock, does not resolve itself.
