From Disintermediation to Digital Reintermediation: Evidence from Madrid Hotels and European Benchmark Studies

Digital transformation has fundamentally reshaped hospitality distribution ecosystems, altering how hotels connect with customers, manage commercial relationships, and access market demand. While early digitalization narratives anticipated a process of disintermediation, the growing influence of platform-based intermediaries suggests a different trajectory. This study examines how digital transformation has reconfigured hotel distribution ecosystems through a comparative temporal analysis combining reservation-channel data for the 2023 operating period collected from a survey of Madrid hotels, with European benchmark studies spanning 2011–2023. Distribution channels were classified as traditional channels, direct digital channels, and digitally intermediated integrated channels (DIICs) according to their degree of technological integration and intermediary control. The harmonized evidence indicates a decline in the harmonized traditional channel, moderate growth in direct digital channels, and higher DIIC reservation shares across the harmonized benchmark evidence. Early European benchmark studies generally reported DIIC shares of approximately 22–24%, whereas the participating Madrid hotels recorded an average share of 49.3%. Overall, the harmonized evidence is consistent with a long-term shift towards digitally intermediated integrated channels, suggesting that digital transformation has reinforced digital reintermediation rather than effective disintermediation. The study contributes to the literature by providing comparative evidence of long-term changes in hotel distribution structures and by introducing the DIIC framework as an analytical lens for examining digitally mediated intermediation. More broadly, the findings support perspectives that conceptualize tourism digital transformation as a process of platformization and ecosystem reconfiguration rather than simply the adoption of new technologies.