Behind the Desk Direct bookings
OTA meaning for hotels, and how many you want
GuestJourney editorial team, edited by Alon Shkuri
The OTA meaning for a hotel is simple: an online travel agency, such as Booking.com or Expedia, sells your rooms on its own site and keeps a commission on each booking. In Europe OTAs bring in 29.9% of hotel bookings on average. There is no correct share for your hotel, but there is a useful test: are they bringing you guests you could not reach yourself?
This mix is made up, and so are Hotel Kadeloft, Anna, Jonas and Laura. The 40% is the assumption behind every Kadeloft sum in our guides; the 8% and the 52% exist only to draw this bar.
That is a hotel of twenty rooms on the quay with nearly half its revenue coming through OTAs. If you have just taken over a hotel, someone will tell you to use them less. Before you decide how much less, it helps to know what you are buying.
What an OTA does for your hotel
An OTA puts your hotel on its site, next to the others in your town, and takes the booking and the first contact with the guest. On Booking.com you register for free and pay commission for each booking, invoiced at the end of each month. For that money Booking.com says it markets your property page on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, and offers support to you and your guests in up to 41 languages.
Jonas is that deal at its best. He needed two nights in town, searched on price and location, and had never heard of Kadeloft. Anna pays €16.50 a night for a guest she could not have reached herself. Khalifa Saqer, CEO of HostelHop, was asked what property owners should understand when they only see the margin. If you are trying to get into the market, he said, you need visibility:
“And the biggest visibility available right now is the OTAs.”
His next step is the part to remember: from there, he says, you slowly grow your own direct bookings.
What it costs, in commission and otherwise
Online travel agency commission is set in your agreement. Booking.com shows you the percentage at the Agreement step when you register. A June 2026 guide by Wise, written for US hosts, gives 10% to 25% there and about 15% as the global and US average. Airbnb publishes its own number: on its single fee most hosts pay 15.5%, and that structure includes hotels. For Expedia and the others we found no rate published by the company itself, only blogs that disagree with each other, so we leave them out. Your contract has the number.
At 15%, Kadeloft pays €16.50 a night, €2,409 in an average month and €28,908 a year. OTA commission is also charged on more than the room rate: read what hotels really pay, or put your own numbers in the commission calculator.
The other cost is less visible. Until arrival, the contact with the guest runs through the OTA's site, and that site shows other hotels next to yours. And you do not fully control your price. In the HOTREC study of 2024, four out of ten hotels were undercut by an OTA, and 44% saw their rates resold through other OTAs or wholesalers. Both were less common at hotels under 20 rooms: undercutting ran 5 to 6 points below the average, and reselling stood at 29%. TRAVEL Extra reports 51% of hoteliers for 2026.
The European shares, in four numbers
51.3%of European hotel bookings are made directly
29.9%come through OTAs, up from 19.7% in 2013
66.1%of OTA bookings go to Booking.com
16.6%of OTA bookings go to Expedia Group
How much OTA business is normal?
| Hotels | Figure |
|---|---|
| All of Europe, weighted average OTA share | 29.6% |
| Netherlands, weighted average OTA share | 44.3% |
| Hotels under 20 rooms, average OTA share | 32.1% |
| Hotels with 20 to 50 rooms, average OTA share | 29.7% |
| Hotels in cities over 250,000 people, average OTA share | 40.2% |
| Hotels in places under 10,000 people, average OTA share | 24.4% |
| Hotels under 20 rooms with 30-49% via OTAs | 27% |
| Hotels under 20 rooms with more than half via OTAs | 27% |
Add the last two rows: 54% of hotels under 20 rooms get at least 30% through OTAs. So if a third or even half of your rooms come that way and you have fewer than twenty rooms, you are not unusual, and in the Netherlands even less so. Kadeloft, with twenty rooms and a made-up 48%, falls just outside that group. The 2026 figures reached us through a press report, the 2024 ones from the study itself.
Not every OTA does the same job
| Kind | Share | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Large general OTAs: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com | 69.3%, 11.5%, 2.1% | At hotels under 20 rooms Booking.com rises to 74.6% and Expedia falls to 6.4% |
| Smaller international OTAs: Agoda, Trip.com | 1.7%, 0.3% | Small in this study. Ask which guests they would bring that you lack now |
| National OTAs: HRS | 4.6% in Europe, 12.7% in Germany | Down from 16.6% across Europe in 2013 |
| Rental platforms: Airbnb | 1.0% | This study covers hotels, so it tells you nothing about B&Bs |
| B&B platforms: Bedandbreakfast.nl | Not in the study | 2 of the 10 B&B sites we checked sent their bookers there |
| Wholesalers: Hotelbeds | 2.4% of all overnight stays | They sell rates on, which is how your room can turn up on a site you never signed with |
| Metasearch: Google Hotel Ads, Tripadvisor, Trivago | 46% of hotels have a connection | They compare prices and sell nothing themselves. Google's list can carry your own link |
That last row is easy to mix up with an OTA. A comparison site passes the guest on to a seller, and that seller can be an OTA, or you.
Three questions for your own booking report
A percentage alone does not tell you whether your share is too high. These three do more:
- Do guests come back through the OTA? A returning guest who books via Booking.com is commission you could have kept. Laura stayed in the spring and wants to come back; if she books there again, that €16.50 a night went on nothing new.
- Is the OTA filling nights you would not sell otherwise, such as a Tuesday in February? Commission on those nights is the easiest to defend.
- Does a guest who searches your hotel's name find a clear way to book with you? If not, some of that share is your own doing. See six places to fix.
Direct bookings vs OTA: you can have both
The average European hotel does both: 51.3% direct and 29.9% through OTAs in the 2026 figures. And direct still mostly means the phone or an email. In the 2024 study, phone and email together made up 28.6% of overnight stays, against 12.3% booked in real time on the hotel's own website.
In the European Economic Area, Booking.com can no longer stop you from being cheaper on your own site. What you need is a direct route that works when a guest looks for it: a booking engine, a Book button on your site and your own link on Google.
For the wider view from the industry, The Future of Hospitality collected what its guests say in How should hotels work with OTAs? GuestJourney sponsors that podcast.
How many OTAs fit your hotel
We know of no study that gives a right number for a small hotel, so the table below is our opinion, with the figures that led us there. One or two, kept properly up to date, beats five you never look at. Every extra listing is another calendar and another set of photos to keep right, and in the HOTREC study 43% of hotels under 20 rooms still managed their channels by hand, against 53% with a channel manager.
| Your hotel | How many | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Up to five rooms, calendar by hand | One, or none if you fill up without it | A second listing is a second calendar, and a double booking lands on you at the door |
| Six to 30 rooms, no channel manager | One | One channel is what you can keep right by hand |
| Six to 30 rooms, with a channel manager | Two, with a named reason for the second | Rates and availability follow from one place. Photos and texts stay your job |
| In a city over 250,000 people | Booking.com and Expedia | Expedia held 17.7% of OTA bookings there, against 7.7% in small towns |
| In Germany | Booking.com, and look at HRS | HRS held 12.7% of OTA bookings there, against 4.6% across Europe |
| Just taken over, calendar empty | One, this week | Visibility first, as Khalifa says. Work on direct once guests know you |
Add another only if you can name the guest it brings who would not find you on the first, such as a market or a language you do not reach. Anna's 8% has to pass that test too. If she cannot name that guest, one calendar less is a good way to spend a Tuesday.
Sources
- TRAVEL Extra on the HOTREC study 2026 (21 September 2026)
- HOTREC, European Hotel Distribution Study 2024 (reference year 2023, 2,537 responses)
- Wise, Booking.com fees guide (29 June 2026)
- Booking.com, FAQ for new partners
- European Commission, factsheet on the DMA and Booking.com (28 September 2026)
- The Future of Hospitality, Make OTAs Your 24/7 Marketing Engine
- The Future of Hospitality, How should hotels work with OTAs?
- Airbnb Help Center, Airbnb service fees