Source: Mauricio
The tech-enabled disintermediation narrative assumes middlemen vanish when friction drops, but travel's stubborn economics keep reinventing them in new forms—regional hubs give way to point-to-point logistics, which spawn their own coordinators. This pattern matters because "cutting out the middleman" often means optimizing which middleman extracts value, not removing intermediation layers. That distinction determines whether platforms genuinely reduce consumer costs or merely redistribute them.