Standing out from OTAs and the travel giants

Let’s be honest: on their turf, you’ll never beat the OTAs. Booking has more ad budget than you ever will, Expedia will always own the first page of Google, and their inventory dwarfs yours. Trying to compete on price and search ranking is a fight with unequal weapons. The right question isn’t “how do we look like them,” it’s “what can’t they do.”

What the giants can’t reproduce

An OTA sells a transaction. You sell a relationship. The traveller who books through you has a real contact, advice, someone who fixes things when a flight falls through. No platform knows how to manufacture that relationship — it’s too human, too slow, too personal for their model. It’s your structural advantage, and most agencies underuse it because they spend their time trying to play the giants’ game. Every hour spent shaving prices to match a platform is an hour not spent deepening the one thing the platform can’t copy.

Recommendation: the channel that’s yours alone

OTAs capture customers through search ranking and retargeting. You capture them through word of mouth — and that’s a channel they can’t take from you. A happy traveller saying “book through my agency, they handle everything” is worth more than ten ads. The trouble is that word of mouth stays vague, spoken, and never gets a concrete shape. It needs an object to make it real.

The postcard as a tool of differentiation

This is where the postcard makes sense. During or after the trip, your client sends a real card in your brand’s colours — not to themselves, to the people close to them. Those people resemble them: same travel budget, same tastes, same way of going away. That’s the statistical twin, exactly the clientele OTAs pay a fortune to target. Except your card doesn’t carry an ad, it carries a friend’s recommendation: “my agency organised everything, it was perfect.” An OTA will never generate that. A platform optimises for the cheapest click; you can optimise for the warmest introduction. Those are different games, and only one of them builds a brand people ask for by name.

And the card lasts. It lands in a mailbox, ends up on a fridge, and stays there for years. While the giants’ ads vanish in one scroll, your name stays in front of a future traveller. Printed and posted in France, it costs a few euros and plays on the one field where you’re unbeatable: trust between people who know each other.

Put a number on your edge

Before investing, measure what the channel can return. Our ROI calculator estimates in minutes what a card handed to your travellers can generate in bookings. Enough to decide on figures.

Standing up to the giants isn’t about imitating them. It’s about pressing where they’re weak: human relationship and recommendation between people who trust each other. That’s your turf. Own it.