Dixie Ellis was leaving margin on the table through third-party affiliates. I helped them see it — and build the confidence to change it.
Dixie Ellis ran a solid business with healthy volume. A meaningful portion of that volume, though, came through third-party affiliates — OTAs and resellers that took a commission on every booking. It's a common pattern. Affiliates feel safe: the bookings come in, the calendar fills up, and the cost is invisible in the moment because it comes off the top of the revenue.
The problem is that invisible costs add up. Commission structures that seem reasonable at low volume become significant at scale. And affiliate dependency creates a fragile business — one where you don't own your customer relationship and have limited control over how your product is presented.
The first thing I did was pull their booking data and build a clear picture of what each channel was actually costing them. Not in abstract percentages — in dollars. Seeing the affiliate commission total laid out explicitly, compared against the cost of acquiring a direct booking, changes the conversation.
Most operators know affiliates take a cut. They don't always know what that cut looks like when you add it up across a full year.
The goal was never to eliminate affiliates overnight — that's a volume risk they couldn't absorb. Instead, we built a phased plan to gradually shift their mix: invest in direct booking channels, improve their own online presence, and let the affiliate share shrink naturally as direct grew.
A lot of this was about confidence-building. Operators worry that if they reduce affiliate exposure, the bookings just won't come. We ran experiments, tracked the results, and let the data answer that fear. They held on, and the direct bookings followed.
This is a pattern I've seen across dozens of accounts: operators who are unknowingly subsidizing channels that don't serve them well, because the cost is diffuse and the habit is entrenched. The CS role here isn't just to make the client happy with the product — it's to be a genuine business advisor. Sometimes that means surfacing uncomfortable math.
Dixie Ellis trusted me enough to do that. That trust was built over time, and the distribution work was only possible because of it.