Who really owns your bookings?

Always exploring how tech, brand and experience intersect, Pedro Colaco leads GuestCentric, a booking engine with a focus on helping independent management companies compete at scale without compromising what makes them distinctive. He’s known for cutting through jargon, spotting trends and helping hoteliers navigate the ever-evolving world of digital distribution and guest engagement.

Here, Colaco shares with us why the future isn’t about where you distribute, but about who trusts you.

—Interview by Jennifer Glatt, edited by Lesley McKenzie

Over the past five years, how have you seen guest behavior around direct bookings shift for boutique/indie hotels, and where do you see the next big opportunity?

The past five years showed a major behavioral shift: guests increasingly use OTAs for discovery, but they go to the hotel website to decide. Covid accelerated this trend, because travelers realized the value of a direct connection with hotels: better information, flexibility and reassurance in uncertain times. That intimacy, once rediscovered, stuck.

But the decisive moment today is what I call the “research click”—the point when a guest leaves an OTA tab and opens your website. That moment is the battleground. Hotels that keep intimacy alive with personal communication, flexibility and reassurance consistently win that moment, and we see many independents in our portfolio achieving 50% or more of direct bookings.

The next opportunity is to make the research click conversion inevitable. That means clearer value signals like flexible terms, exclusive perks, local experiences and the ability to surface them consistently wherever the guest is shopping. We call this Hypercommerce: not passively waiting for guests to find you, but meeting them across the full spectrum of channels they are in, then converting website visits into confident, direct bookings.

Many independents feel caught between needing OTA exposure and wanting to drive direct bookings. What realistic strategies have you seen work for small hotels to maintain visibility without becoming overly dependent on OTAs?

OTAs rent out visibility. That visibility is valuable because most guest journeys still start there. But the mistake independents often make is confusing visibility with loyalty. Direct is where you build equity, where you own the guest relationship.

The realistic strategy is to treat OTAs as top-of-funnel marketing, never the full funnel. The hotels that effectively manage this balance do three things:

Parity on price, exclusivity on value. Guests should never see cheaper prices on OTAs than direct: price is still the number one decision factor. But direct must come with more: upgrades, local passes, flexible add-ons. Reciprocity matters here. When you offer guests something unique, they are more likely to repay you with trust and a direct booking.

Meta search as a bridge. With Google Hotels Free Booking Links and low-cost connectivity, the tide has turned toward independents. You can now intercept OTA lookers with modest investment and bring them back to your site.

Ease of booking. An AMADEUS study confirmed what behavioral economics tells us: the easier the path, the more likely it becomes the default. Every extra click or friction point pushes the guest back to an OTA.

So, yes, OTAs have a place. But they are not your partner; they are your landlord. Smart hoteliers use OTA reach while ensuring that the conversion—and the relationship—happens on their own website.

What are the top elements of a high-converting boutique hotel website that most owners overlook or undervalue?

The problem is that too many hotel websites are still brochures designed to make the owner proud rather than decision engines designed to make the guest confident. To drive conversion, a guest-centric website must deliver on four behavioral levers:

Trust. Transparent policies, clear rate comparisons, visible social proof. Trust lowers perceived risk, which is the main reason guests default back to OTAs.

Clarity. Unified website and booking engine, with price and availability visible up front. A buried booking button is an invitation to bounce.

Speed. Mobile-first, frictionless checkout. Behavioral economics shows every 100 milliseconds of delay cuts conversion by ~1%. Zero typing, one-click options.

Personalization. Letting guests choose room location, connecting rooms or special touches. These options shift the experience from transactional to tailored, and activate the endowment effect: guests feel ownership of their stay even before arrival.

When you combine trust, clarity, speed and personalization, your website doesn’t just sell rooms. It becomes the guest’s default booking choice.

If you had to place one big bet on the future of independent hotel distribution and marketing, what would it be?

The future isn’t about where you distribute, but about who trusts you. Guests will increasingly book through AI-driven discovery, conversational interfaces and automated personalization. Booking will start as simple as asking your phone or digital agent to “find me a boutique hotel in Copenhagen with character.”

The winners will be the hotels that are both machine-readable and emotionally resonant. Your digital presence has to speak to two audiences at once: the guest who makes decisions emotionally, and the AI agent which makes decisions rationally. If your story is invisible to AI or flat to guests, you lose.

Boutiques don’t need Marriott-scale databases to win this game. They need clarity of value, resonance of story and the technology to amplify both. That’s the real future of independent distribution.

Thanks for reading today's edition! You can reach the newsletter team at newsletter@mintpillow.co. We enjoy hearing from you.

Interested in advertising? Email us at newslettersales@mvfglobal.com

Mint Pillow is curated and written by Jennifer Glatt and edited by Lesley McKenzie.