The asset worth more than your website, which you might not have: your guest list.

Play a mental game. Tomorrow morning Instagram closes your account by mistake, Google changes its algorithm and you vanish from page one, the OTA you're on demotes you in its results. What's left in your hands to fill next season?

If the answer is "not much", the problem isn't visibility. It's ownership. The profile belongs to Meta, the ranking belongs to Google, the customer who booked through the portal belongs to the portal. There is exactly one thing that stays yours no matter what happens out there: the contact list of your guests and of the people who've asked about you.

The OTA brings you the customer. Then keeps them

The commission you can see on the invoice: Booking.com starts at 15% and climbs to 20-25% if you join the "preferred" programs for extra visibility, Expedia runs between 18% and 22%. On a €900 retreat that's €135-200 per person. It hurts, but at least it's a visible cost.

The invisible cost is worse. When a guest books through the portal, you don't receive their real email: you receive an alias address generated by the portal, which stops working after the stay. It's the portal that holds the real contact, the history, the permission to write again. And it's the portal that will write to them next year, proposing ten properties, your competitors included. You had that person in your home for a week. The portal keeps them forever.

Result: a year from now you'll have paid dozens of commissions and you'll have the same contacts you have today. Whoever builds a list, in that same year, ends up with an audience of their own to write to for free when bookings open.

A list isn't an address book. It's a channel

It's worth understanding why email, which feels like old technology, remains the highest-return channel in marketing. Litmus's State of Email survey of roughly 500 marketers estimates an average return of $36 for every dollar spent, more than any other channel. It's an average across industries, so treat it as an order of magnitude, not a promise. But the mechanism explaining it applies identically to a retreat.

The mechanism is this: when you publish an Instagram post, a tiny fraction of your followers sees it. The Rival IQ 2025 benchmark measures a median engagement rate of 0.36% on Instagram posts: out of 3,000 followers, about ten people. When you send an email to your list, it lands in everyone's mailbox, and in travel roughly 3 in 10 open it (MailerLite 2025 benchmark for the travel sector: 30% opens). You pay nobody to reach them. You depend on no algorithm deciding whether to show you. And you can write "September bookings now open, 4 spots" knowing the message reaches people who already know you.

For a business like yours there's one extra advantage the averages don't capture: your sessions have fixed dates and limited seats. A list of 400 right people, at a decent open rate, is enough to fill the 12 spots of a retreat. You don't need a huge audience. You need an audience of your own.

What you can do starting Monday

First: collect contacts at every point where a person touches you. Whoever writes for a quote, whoever fills the form on the site, whoever has already stayed, whoever messages you on WhatsApp and then disappears. Each of these is a contact that today probably evaporates between chats.

Second: give a real reason to leave the email. "Subscribe to our newsletter" isn't one. "I'll let you know when the spring dates open, before the spots run out" is. For those not ready to book, a useful guide works too: what to pack, how to prepare, which season to pick.

Third: put the contacts in one place, and one that's yours. A real email tool (Mailerlite, Brevo and the like cost nothing or little up to a few thousand contacts), not an Excel sheet and three phone address books. With explicit consent to receive your messages: in Europe the GDPR requires it, and a permission-built list is worth double, because everyone on it chose to be there.

Fourth: write rarely and when you have something to say. Dates opening, last spots, a useful piece now and then. Nobody complains about three emails a year from a place they love. Everyone unsubscribes from one a week full of nothing.

The ownership test

Back to the opening mental game. The right question to ask yourself now and then: of everything I've built to get found, what do I own and what am I renting? The website is yours. The list is yours. Everything else, from followers to portal reviews, lives on someone else's land, on terms someone else can change tomorrow.

That doesn't mean abandoning OTAs and social: it means using them as entrances, not as home. Every guest who arrives through a portal and leaves you their real email is a customer who pays no commission on their next booking. The automations that collect and nurture those contacts are exactly what we build at GYT, so if you'd like to know how much of your clientele is truly yours today and how much is rented, it's one of the first things we look at together in a free audit.

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SOURCES

1. Cloudbeds · "A Guide to OTA Commission Rates in 2026" · https://www.cloudbeds.com/online-travel-agencies/commissions/ · Commission ranges: Booking.com 15-17% standard, 20-25% preferred; Expedia 18-22%. Verified July 2026.
2. Litmus · State of Email / email marketing ROI · https://www.litmus.com/resources/email-marketing-roi · Average ROI of $36 per $1 spent, survey of ~500 marketers. Cited as a cross-industry order of magnitude, with an explicit caveat in the text. Verified July 2026.
3. Rival IQ · 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report · https://www.rivaliq.com/resources/download-the-2025-social-media-industry-benchmark-report/ · Median Instagram engagement 0.36% (all industries, 2025). Verified July 2026.
4. MailerLite · Email Marketing Benchmarks 2025 · https://www.mailerlite.com/blog/compare-your-email-performance-metrics-industry-benchmarks · Travel sector open rate ~30%. Verified July 2026. Note: post Apple Mail Privacy Protection open rates skew high; hence "roughly 3 in 10" in the text, no decimals.