This diagram comes with one big caveat: Everything is more complicated than it looks. It used to be that entities on this network could occupy a single box within the hotel distribution landscape: A switch company was just an intermediary between hotels’ central reservation systems and the global distribution systems, and a channel manager was only an inventory distributor to sales and marketing channels. Now, however, players in this space have become multifunctional as a way to adapt to changes in technology, to overcome other nodes’ failure to change and to avoid becoming commoditized. The result is a complex web.