MLM With a Luxury Label
The world moves fast. Luxury travel distribution has not moved for years.
We talk about innovation constantly – new platforms, new tools, new ways to reach the right traveller.
And for a moment, AI felt like it might actually change something. It was supposed to disrupt the industry, threaten the intermediaries, and cut through the noise.
Instead, watch how it is actually being used: to write better descriptions for the same tired inventory, just more standardised and similar to each other, to personalise emails that move product through the same broken chain and funnels no one wants to operate on or read, to optimise a distribution model that should not be optimised, but replaced because it damages everything it touches…
We can blame the technology because it has no name, no face and carries no responsibility. It exists next to us in its parallel world.
But there is a problem the industry has chosen not to notice.
The technology does what people direct it to do. And the people directing it stopped learning a long time ago. They neither step outside their comfort zone nor expand it to integrate anything new.
When the technology stops working on the old system, the technology is blamed.
Most people I meet follow the same path. In this industry, nothing new becomes natural. It is processed, forced into existing structures, and reduced to what already feels familiar.
AI did not save the old system. The old system captured AI and put it to work. In many cases and in many agencies replacing real people and real work positions.
But underneath all of it, the structure has not changed. It still works like MLM with a luxury label.
Layer on layer, each one adding its margin requirement, each one sitting between the hotel and the guest, each one calling itself a solution while being part of the problem.
At the bottom of that structure, someone works and earns only when the client actually arrives. No arrival, no income. They carry the risk, invest, take loans to meet the system’s expectations, absorb the uncertainty, and depend on every layer above them functioning in their favour.
At the top, the conversation is different – not whether there will be a dividend, but whether it will be ten million larger or smaller than last year.
Same system. Different exposure to its consequences.
The hotel discounts to the wholesaler. The wholesaler marks up to the agency. The agency adds its fee. The DMC takes its cut.
And somewhere at the end of that chain, a traveller pays a price that was never really about value but about covering the cost of the structure itself.
Meanwhile, the hotel that created the product, the destination that carries the weight of it, absorb the consequences: compressed margins, distorted rates, demand that no longer reflects what they actually want to build and protect.
And quietly, in the background, the place itself begins to change.
Crowds that did not exist a decade ago, prices locals can no longer afford, a texture that gets thinner every season.
The hotels that built their positioning over decades are starting to feel it in their rate parity, in their direct booking share, in conversations with destinations that are beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about who actually benefits from the volumes they carry.
This is not a technology problem.
No platform fixes a structural issue by sitting on top of it. The problem is that too many layers have become too comfortable – and comfortable structures do not dismantle themselves.
And while that comfort is protected at the top of the chain, the consequences settle somewhere else entirely.
In the streets that tourists photograph and then leave.
In the communities that remain after the season ends, living inside a place that was quietly sold from underneath them — not in a single transaction, but across thousands of small margin decisions made by people who were never going to stay.
Overtourism is not an accident. It is what happens when a distribution system optimises for volume without ever being accountable for what volume does to a place.
The people who built those destinations, who live in them, who will still be there in twenty years … they had no seat at the table when those decisions were made.
Someone has to overturn the table.
I am not writing this to be provocative.
I am writing it because I have spent long enough watching a model that serves its own continuity more than it serves the industry, and because I think the hotels and DMCs who feel this pressure every quarter deserve something built on a different logic.
That is what I am building.
If this structure feels familiar, you already know where you stand. What comes next depends on who you are in it.
