The One-Channel Problem

Most travel and tourism businesses I'm asked to look at open with the same line. Growth has stalled. They want to know where the next gear is.

Almost none of them have a growth problem. They have a distribution problem wearing a growth problem's clothes.

The pattern is always the same. A business finds one channel that works - an OTA, a single wholesaler, a referral relationship, one strong feeder market. It works well enough that everything gets pointed at it. The channel becomes the business. And for a while that's the right call. Concentration is efficient. You learn the channel, you optimise for it, the numbers go up and to the right.

Then the channel stops growing. Or it changes its commercial terms. Or it gets acquired, or it quietly decides it doesn't need you the way it used to. And the business discovers it never built a second engine. It built one engine and a lot of confidence.

By the time that happens, the conversation has usually already shifted to marketing. More spend, a new campaign, a rebrand. None of it works, because the problem was never demand. The problem is that demand only had one road into the business, and the road narrowed.

Distribution is not a marketing line item. It is the structural question of how many independent ways revenue can reach you - and how exposed you are if any one of them moves. A business with one channel doing 70 percent of revenue isn't a market leader. It's a tenant.

The fix isn't dramatic, but it is deliberate. Three things, in order:

Name your concentration honestly. Put every channel on one page with the revenue it carries and the terms you're on. Most operators have never seen this written down. The number that carries the most revenue is almost always the one you have the least control over.

Open a channel you don't currently have access to. Not a better version of the one you have - a genuinely different road. Trade distribution if you're direct. Direct if you're trade. A new feeder market, a partnership that puts you in front of an audience you can't reach alone. The point is independence, not volume.

Build it before you need it. A second channel started under pressure, after the first one falters, is started two years too late. The time to diversify distribution is while the main channel is still strong enough to fund the work.

None of this is fast. Opening a real channel takes relationships, terms, and patience - which is exactly why so few businesses do it, and why the ones that do are so much harder to displace.

If you can name the one channel that would hurt most to lose, you already know where the work is.