How much do OTAs actually charge hotels?

Commission on an OTA booking is never invoiced. Booking.com and Expedia deduct their percentage automatically before the balance reaches the hotel's account, so the cost never arrives as a bill an owner has to approve or push back on. Ask most independent hoteliers what OTA distribution cost them last year and few can answer without pulling several reports together first.

TL;DR: OTA commission, the cut Booking.com, Expedia and similar platforms take from a completed booking, runs at 10 to 25% of the booking value depending on property and country per Booking.com's own partner documentation, averaging close to 15% for a standard listing, and yours may sit anywhere in that range. That figure is only the start. Visibility programmes add points on top, rate parity pressure has outlived much of its old legal backing, an OTA can outbid a hotel's own brand name on Google, guest data the hotel never receives is a real cost, and OTA bookings cancel differently to direct ones. The question worth answering is not whether the percentage is fair, it is what a hotel's blended cost of acquiring a booking looks like once every channel is counted the same way, and OTAs genuinely earn their fee in some markets and seasons more than others. This piece covers what commission is, what sits on top of it, the costs that are not commission at all, a worked example, a real rebalancing case, and when cutting OTA share is the wrong move.

This is written for the owner or general manager of an independent hotel who has looked at a Booking.com extranet statement and wants a straight answer on what OTA distribution actually costs, not a pitch for direct bookings at any cost.

What OTA commission is, and when it is actually charged

The standard OTA model charges a percentage of room revenue on a completed stay, not on the reservation itself. Booking.com's own partner documentation is specific: commission is paid on confirmed stays after the guest has checked out and paid, and it is also charged on non-refundable bookings even if the guest never arrives, because the guest has already been billed. Local taxes such as city tax generally fall outside the commissionable amount. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a hotel with a high no-show rate on non-refundable rates is still paying commission on rooms nobody stayed in.

What the rates commonly look like

There is no single number, and every source that gives one draws the line slightly differently. Booking.com's own partner help documentation describes commission as typically ranging from 10 to 25% depending on property and country, averaging close to 15% for a standard listing. Broader industry analysis from EHL Hospitality Insights puts commission across the wider OTA market, once visibility and promotional fees are folded in, at a level considerably higher than the historical baseline. The direction is consistent even where the edges differ: commission has moved up over the past decade, not down. The figure that governs your payouts is the one in your own accommodation agreement, not a headline average.

Visibility programmes and ranking: what sits on top of the base rate

The base rate is rarely the whole picture. Booking.com's Preferred Partner Programme, and equivalent schemes elsewhere, trade a ranking boost for additional percentage points on top of the base commission, more again on the top tier. None of this is hidden; it is opt-in, and a property can decline it. The pattern we see on real accounts is a hotel that joined during a slow month, got used to the extra volume, and never revisited whether the points still earned their keep once demand recovered.

The costs that are not commission at all

Commission is the cost hoteliers can see on a statement. The costs below rarely appear as a line item anywhere, which is exactly why they get underweighted.

Rate parity pressure has not disappeared just because the legal ground shifted. The European Court of Justice ruled in September 2024, in the Booking.com case against a group of German hotels, that OTA price parity clauses cannot automatically be justified as necessary to the platform's business under EU competition law: they lost their automatic protection, and whether any given clause survives now has to be argued case by case. That materially weakens the old constraint without erasing it, and what your own agreement allows in your own market is a question for your own advisers, not a blog. In practice the point is often moot anyway: most platforms still reward parity in their ranking algorithms, so undercutting your own OTA listing risks losing visibility whatever the contract says. The legal backing weakened; the incentive that made hotels comply largely has not.

An OTA outbidding a hotel's own name is a quieter drain. It is common for an OTA to run paid search ads against a hotel's brand name, so a guest searching for the property by name lands on a Booking.com results page before the hotel's own site appears. How hotels outrank OTAs on the searches that should be easy wins covers this specifically: fixable, but not free, and most hotels never notice it is happening until someone checks.

Guest data and cancellation behaviour are two more costs with no line item anywhere. OTA bookings routinely arrive with a temporary, masked email address that expires after the stay, and the relay system limits what can pass through it; a direct booking hands the hotel a verified email and a stay history to build on, an OTA booking rarely hands it anything that survives checkout. That is not an oversight; the guest relationship is the asset, and the platform has little reason to let a hotel own it. OTAs also built much of their growth on free-cancellation rate plans, which changes how a guest treats a booking before the hotel ever sees it: a reservation made with nothing at stake gets abandoned more easily than one made directly against a card that is actually being held, and commission captures none of that lost inventory.

Commission is a customer acquisition cost, not a moral question

None of this is an argument that the percentage is outrageous. It is a customer acquisition cost, the same category as a paid search budget, and every channel that brings a hotel a guest has a cost attached, direct channels included. Email marketing, paid search, metasearch bids and the booking engine itself all cost money and staff time; they are simply costs a hotel pays directly rather than having deducted automatically. Watch how the choice actually gets made from the guest's side and the OTA rarely wins on price. It wins because the cancellation policy is obvious before a card number has been entered; on plenty of independent hotel sites the same reassurance is buried two clicks deep or missing entirely. The question that matters is not whether the OTA percentage feels high in isolation, it is what the blended cost of acquisition looks like once every channel, OTA and direct, is counted the same way.

A worked example: same hotel, two channel mixes

Take a fictional 24-room countryside hotel, call it Villa Sonnino, doing 4,000 room-nights a year at an average rate of €140: €560,000 in gross room revenue. This is an illustration, not a real property, but the arithmetic is exact.

At a 90% OTA share and a blended 17% commission on that share, OTA commission comes to roughly €85,680 (560,000 x 0.9 x 0.17). At a 60% OTA share, the same blended rate on the smaller OTA slice produces roughly €57,120 (560,000 x 0.6 x 0.17), a saving of around €28,560 in commission alone.

That saving is not free money. The other 30% of revenue that used to arrive via OTA now has to be earned through the hotel's own channels: paid search, email to a list it can only build from direct and repeat guests, a booking engine that actually converts. If funding that shift costs, say, €15,000 to €20,000 a year in direct marketing that did not previously exist, the hotel is still ahead, but the honest comparison is OTA commission per booking against direct acquisition cost per booking, never commission against a channel assumed to cost nothing.

What actually moved when a hotel rebalanced its mix

Le Torri di Porsenna, a hotel we have worked with directly, lifted direct bookings 31% and cut its OTA commission cost by 20% in the first month of a deliberate rebalancing, moving its OTA reliance from roughly 90% of bookings down to roughly 60%. Those are the two figures worth sitting with: the commission line dropped fast, and the mix moved by the kind of margin used in the worked example above, not a token few percentage points. How independent hotels can reduce reliance on OTAs and increase direct bookings sets out the mechanics behind a shift like that: a deliberate programme of work, not a decision to switch a channel off.

The failure mode: money you never see is money nobody questions

The hotel that treats OTA commission as invisible, because it is deducted rather than invoiced, is the single most common pattern behind an over-reliant mix. Put the same annual total in front of that owner as a monthly marketing invoice, a bill someone has to sign off, and it would very likely get scrutinised or negotiated down. Because it never arrives as a bill, it rarely gets that scrutiny at all. And there is a second version of the same trap we have met on real accounts: an owner who knows the number perfectly well and pays it anyway, not out of blindness but because nobody has ever shown them a credible alternative. Awareness without an alternative changes nothing. Why small hotels should focus on direct bookings is really an argument about visibility as much as strategy: hard to manage a cost you have never had to look at in one place.

When cutting OTA share is the wrong move

Reducing OTA reliance is not automatically the right call. A newly opened hotel with no reviews, no direct search visibility and no guest list of its own needs the OTA billboard effect, documented by Cornell University's hospitality research programme as a genuine lift in a property's own direct bookings simply from being listed on an OTA, before it can meaningfully reduce reliance on it. A property in a market it cannot reach alone, or running at low occupancy in a season where OTA demand is the only demand available, is in a similar position: the commission is buying reach the hotel could not otherwise afford, and pulling back there trades a real cost for a worse one, empty rooms. The right OTA share is not zero. It is chosen deliberately, with the same rigour as any other marketing spend, and revisited as the property's own visibility grows.

How to work out your own number

Pull twelve months of bookings by channel, and the actual commission or cost against each one, then divide by bookings on that channel to get a cost per booking. Do the same for direct: total spend on paid search, email, the booking engine and any staff time genuinely allocated to it, divided by direct bookings over the same period. Compare the two per-booking figures rather than the percentages, because a 17% OTA commission on a lower average rate can cost less per booking than a supposedly free direct channel carrying a real acquisition cost once everything is counted honestly.

If working out that blended number sounds like more analysis than you have time for, that is precisely what we look at before recommending anything. Get a free audit and we will put your actual channel mix and blended acquisition cost in front of you before suggesting a single change.