Who Owns the Relationship After the Transaction?

Intermediaries aren’t stealing customer relationships. Business are handing them over.

Three seemingly unrelated posts caught my eye recently:

• Alec Ellin on the Live Nation / Ticketmaster antitrust ruling.
• Bashar Wali on hotel distribution and OTAs.
• Allison Page – founder of SevenRooms, an OpenTable competitor – on a terms update that effectively requires restaurants to make OpenTable their system of record.

Ellin, whose platform powers fan relationships for artists like Sabrina Carpenter and major festivals, cut through the noise on the Live Nation decision: whatever the remedy, artists who own their fan relationships come out ahead. “Owning your audience data means you decide how to engage the fans who show up and take action, rather than waiting to find out.”

Wali said it most plainly in the hotel context: use OTAs for reach. Don’t let them own the relationship. “If your hotel only becomes visible when someone else sells it, you don’t have a brand. You have inventory. And inventory gets priced by whoever controls the shelf.”

Page flagged the OpenTable terms change for what it is: flexibility on paper, lock-in in practice.

The customer relationship exists in all of them. Fans still follow artists. Guests return to hotels. Diners go back to restaurants they love. The relationship doesn’t reset. But your ability to build on it does.

When the relationship is intermediated, you don’t control when or how to reach the customer next. You don’t control what to offer them. You don’t control how the experience extends beyond that first interaction – and that’s where the real value sits. Merchandise, special releases, VIP experiences, bundled stays, repeat visits, loyalty. None of it is automatic. 

All of it depends on whether you can act on the relationship, not just participate in the transaction.

The problem isn’t access. Access usually exists at the point of purchase or check-in. The problem is continuity.

This isn’t only a hospitality problem or an entertainment problem. It’s the condition of any business whose front door runs through someone else’s platform. Retail through Amazon. Software through app stores. Services through Google. The intermediary provides reach. The question is always the same: what do you own after the transaction?

The next version of this question is already forming. When AI agents begin making purchasing decisions on behalf of customers – booking the dinner, selecting the hotel, buying the ticket – the intermediation doesn’t disappear. It deepens. The customer may never visit your interface at all. 

The relationship exists. Your access to it may not. An OTA captures your customer at the point of search. An AI agent may capture them before they search. Same problem. Earlier in the funnel. Harder to recover from.

Intermediaries are part of the model. The decision is whether the relationship lives only inside them. Because while the relationship persists, your ability to build on it is not guaranteed.

If you’re leading an organization, that’s a growth model decision, not a marketing one. Where intermediaries control access – today’s platforms or tomorrow’s agents – you have to deliberately design what happens after the transaction. What you offer. How you reach them. What comes next.

Photo by Natalia Y. on Unsplash