The Firm Teaching Hotels to Stop Paying Expedia
The Fort Lauderdale firm has spent three decades trying to answer one question for hoteliers: how do you get a guest to book with you instead of with Expedia?
Every time a traveler books a room through an online travel agency, the hotel hands over a slice of the rate - often 15 to 25 percent - as commission. Multiply that across a full house, every night, and it becomes the single largest controllable cost on the property's books. Tambourine's entire business is built on one wager: that the hotel would rather own that guest than rent them.
Based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Tambourine is a hospitality marketing and technology company that builds hotel websites, a direct booking engine, performance-marketing programs and analytics - and bundles them into what it now calls "commercial strategy" rather than plain marketing. It has been at this, in one form or another, since 1994, and its work reaches hotel brands in more than 50 countries.
The pitch is narrow and unglamorous, which is part of why it holds up. Hotels are very good at running hotels and, as a rule, less good at running the internet. Tambourine sells itself as the department a property cannot easily build in-house: the people who design the website a guest lands on, run the ads that got them there, and operate the engine that turns a browse into a booking without a middleman taking a cut.
01 / The ProblemThe commission trap
The economics of hotel distribution are lopsided. Online travel agencies - Expedia, Booking.com and their peers - deliver enormous reach, but they charge for it on every reservation, and they own the guest's data afterward. For an independent property, that is a Faustian bargain: fill the rooms today, weaken the direct relationship tomorrow.
Tambourine's answer is to make the direct channel good enough that guests choose it. That means a website fast enough to hold attention, a booking flow short enough not to lose the traveler between "search" and "confirm," and marketing precise enough to reach the right person before an OTA does. Each piece is ordinary on its own. The company's argument is that owning all of them together is what actually moves the direct-booking number.
02 / The ProductOne stack, no toll booth
In January 2026 the company launched Tambourine One, a product that folds the hotel website and the booking engine into a single system - and, notably for the category, drops per-reservation transaction fees on room bookings entirely. It adds mobile-wallet checkout through Apple Pay and Google Pay, room-and-air packaging, website personalization, travel insurance, accessibility protection and a front-end CMS that lets hotel staff edit pages with AI assistance.
"With Tambourine One, we remove friction at every turn, helping more travelers book in fewer steps."Mekell Barker, SVP of Account Service
The zero-fee move is easier to understand once you see the rest of the roadmap. In 2024 Tambourine acquired ReservHotel, a booking platform that had run for more than 30 years and served roughly 500 resorts and hotels across the Caribbean and Latin America - complete with a dedicated reservations call center. The platform was rebranded as Reserv by Tambourine. When a company already owns the plumbing, it can afford to stop charging tolls on it.
Tambourine One
Unified hotel website and zero-fee booking engine with mobile wallets, packaging and an AI-enabled CMS. Launched 2026.
Reserv by Tambourine
Booking engine and reservations call center for Caribbean and Latin American resorts, from the 2024 ReservHotel acquisition.
Performance Media
Segment-based paid search, social and metasearch built to drive qualified booking demand.
Analytics & Branding
A hospitality data warehouse and reporting stack, plus brand, photography and social content.
03 / The CustomersFrom independents to Hilton
Tambourine's largest base is independent hotels in the United States, the properties with the most to lose to commissions and the least ability to build a tech team. But the client list also runs up to the brands: work has included Hyatt, Hilton, Choice Hotels, InterContinental Miami and Lotte New York Palace, along with destination bodies such as the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism.
That range matters. A mid-size independent and a flagged luxury property have opposite problems - one needs a website department it will never hire, the other needs campaigns sharp enough to justify a marketing budget - and Tambourine sells to both with the same underlying stack.
04 / The DifferenceMarketing that shows up as revenue
Plenty of agencies promise hotels "more traffic." Tambourine leans on a colder metric: direct revenue that did not pass through a commission. Its most decorated recent campaign is not a banner ad but a mini-documentary about private pilots flying routes across the Bahamas, produced with the country's tourism ministry - the kind of content travelers actually watch, sold as demand generation. It took gold at the 2024 HSMAI Adrian Awards, the industry's largest travel-marketing competition.
"This acquisition is the inevitable next step in our journey. We transformed how hotels present themselves online."Rafael Cardozo, CEO
The other difference is structural. Competitors such as Cendyn, Sojern and Amadeus tend to specialize - one owns the booking engine, another the media, another the CRM. Tambourine's bet is that hotels are tired of stitching four vendors together and want one company answerable for the whole funnel. The word it uses, repeatedly, is "commercial strategy": sales, marketing, revenue and reservations on one org chart rather than four.
05 / The BusinessHow it makes money
The model is B2B: recurring subscriptions for the website and booking technology, plus retainers for managed performance-marketing work. Tambourine One's twist is to remove the per-reservation fee and fold in tools a hotel would otherwise buy from several vendors, betting that consolidation wins the account and keeps it. The company employs around 330 people across Fort Lauderdale, New York City and Bogotá, Colombia, where much of the engineering and Latin American reservations work sits. It took an undisclosed venture round in 2020.
06 / The PositionWhere it sits in the market
Hospitality technology is crowded, but it is also fragmented, and Tambourine has spent 30 years occupying the overlap between two categories that usually stay apart: the creative agency and the software vendor. It describes its people as "artists, analysts and engineers," which reads like a slogan until you notice it acquired a call center and a booking platform in the same stretch that it was winning documentary awards. Few competitors sit on both sides of that line.
The longer story is one of a company that kept the same customer - the hotelier - and rebuilt its product around them repeatedly: print in the 1980s, digital in the 1990s, an integrated commercial-strategy platform in the 2020s. Whether "own the whole funnel" beats "best-in-class at one thing" is the open question in the category. Tambourine has placed its chips on owning the funnel.