Should your hotel leave the OTAs? A decision guide for independent hotels

For most independent hotels, no. Taking your property off Booking.com and Expedia removes a channel that finds guests you would struggle to reach yourself. The commission you save only comes back if those guests book with you directly, and plenty of them will simply book the hotel down the street that is still listed.

A more useful question is which OTA bookings you are overpaying for. Some you would probably get anyway: repeat guests, travellers from your own country, people who already know your name. Those are worth winning back. Others come from markets your marketing budget will never reach, or from a guest searching on a phone at nine in the evening for a room tonight, and for those the commission is a reasonable price for a booking you would otherwise not have.

So the booking direct vs OTA decision is rarely all or nothing. It is a question of mix, and the answer depends on where your guests come from and how they find you. Your channel report from the PMS will tell you more than any rule of thumb, including the one in this guide.

Reach is the main one. A family in Chicago or Seoul planning a week in Europe is far more likely to open Booking.com than to land on the website of a 40-room hotel they have never heard of. OTAs spend on marketing to exactly those travellers, and you get access to that spend for a commission instead of a fixed budget.

They also handle short-lead demand well. A guest booking for tonight or this weekend wants to compare a few options quickly and pay with a card already saved in an app. Your site can win that guest if it is fast and clear, but many independent hotels' booking engines are not, and the OTA catches the booking instead.

Then there is the infrastructure: payment handling, cancellations, guest support, and the trust a first-time guest places in a platform they have used before. For a new property, or a seasonal one without a marketing budget, that trade can make sense for a large part of its bookings.

Finally, your OTA listing and the guest reviews on it are part of how you are seen elsewhere. They are among the third-party records Google and AI assistants read about your hotel, which matters for the section on discovery below.

What you pay an OTA depends on which OTA it is, your market and your contract. Our guide to OTA commission rates explains why there is no single industry rate. Commission is charged on the full booking value, so it takes a bigger share of your margin than the percentage suggests.

Booking.com shows how the headline rate grows. According to its partner help pages, commission is charged on the room rate plus fees such as cleaning and cancellation charges, and in most countries on VAT too, though not on city tax. Preferred Partner and Visibility Booster add percentage points on top of your base rate, and Genius asks you to fund a discount for members, 10% by default. In the worked example in our Booking.com commission guide, a 15% base rate becomes an effective cost of about 22% once an assumed mix of programmes is added. Use your own contract and invoices, because Booking.com does not publish a standard rate.

The cost you will not see on an invoice is the guest relationship. When a guest books through an OTA, the platform keeps the contact and the stay history. If that guest comes back next year through the same OTA, you pay commission again on a guest you already earned once.

One cost has shrunk for hotels in the EEA. Under the EU Digital Markets Act, since 14 November 2024 Booking.com has had to let hotels offer better prices and conditions elsewhere, including on their own websites. You are free to give direct guests a better deal, which makes winning them back easier than it was a few years ago.

1. Repeat guests are arriving through OTAs. Search your PMS for guests with more than one stay and check the channel of their latest booking. Each one who rebooked through an OTA is commission paid on a relationship you already had, and the easiest booking to win back.

2. A large part of your OTA business comes from nearby markets. Break OTA room nights down by guest country. Guests from your own country or neighbouring ones are people you can reach with your own search presence, newsletters, local partners and a website in their language. Guests from other continents are where the OTA earns its fee.

3. Guests already search for you by name. Look at branded search impressions for your hotel in Google Search Console. If they are rising while direct bookings stay flat, guests are looking for you and booking somewhere else, which usually points to a problem on your own site rather than a reason to stay on the OTA.

4. Your direct booking path holds up. Your website price is at least equal to the OTA price for the same room and conditions, you offer one benefit the OTA listing cannot show, such as breakfast or a later checkout, and a guest can book on a phone in a few steps. If any of these fail, fix them first. Cut OTA exposure before your own checkout works and those guests will mostly book a competitor that is still listed.

5. You sell out your busiest dates anyway. If peak weekends fill months ahead, paying extra commission for visibility on those dates buys you nothing. Switch off Visibility Booster or similar paid placements for them and keep the listing itself live.

If none of these apply, your OTA share may simply reflect how your guests find you, and the work is better spent on discovery before you touch the mix.

There is research behind the idea that an OTA listing helps your direct channel too. In 2009 Chris Anderson at Cornell found that four hotels saw reservations through their own channels rise by between 7.5% and 26% while they were listed on Expedia. His 2011 follow-up, on InterContinental Hotels Group brands, found that each Expedia reservation came with three to nine additional reservations on the brand's own website. Guests browsed the OTA, then searched for the hotel and booked direct. This is the billboard effect, and it is a reason to be careful about delisting: you may lose some of the direct bookings the listing was quietly sending you. Our article on the billboard effect after AI covers the research and its limits in more detail.

A guest who asks ChatGPT or Gemini where to stay takes a different path. They get a short written answer that names a few hotels, and the assistant may lean on OTA listings to write it. In our own scans of Prague hotels, when AI engines did not name Golden Well Hotel, they leaned most on Booking.com and TripAdvisor, plus a French travel blog and thehotelguru.com. For Mosaic House Design Hotel the cited sources were Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia and thehotelguru.com.

The same scans show where a hotel can win. Golden Well was named in 21 of 295 non-branded questions (7.1%), mostly occasion questions such as "best hotel in Prague for a honeymoon", and missed broad ones such as "good hotels to stay at in Prague". Mosaic House was named in 25 of 200 (12.5%), for identity questions such as "unique hotels to stay in Prague", and missed generic location questions. These are individual hotels at a point in time, not a sample of the industry, and nobody can guarantee that an AI assistant will recommend a particular hotel.

This matters for the mix. Broad questions about a city tend to go to the OTAs, and there is little point fighting for them. Specific questions about your kind of stay, your neighbourhood or an amenity you actually have are where your own site can be the better answer, and the guests asking them are among the easiest to win back.

Treat 5 to 10 points of direct share as a target you set, not a result anyone can promise. A hotel at 15% direct with many repeat guests on OTAs has more room to move than one at 50% whose OTA guests mostly fly in from overseas. Measure first, then decide whether your number is 3, 5 or 10.

Days 1 to 30, the baseline. Work out direct share as direct room revenue divided by total room revenue for each of the last twelve months. Split your OTA room nights into keep and win back: distant markets, short-lead bookings and first stays go in keep; repeat guests and your own region go in win back. Check which questions AI assistants answer about your city and type of stay, and whether they name you. You can ask by hand, or run the free Staylight scan, which checks 15 questions across 3 AI engines with no card required. Then set your target.

Days 31 to 60, the direct path. Compare your website price with your two biggest OTAs for the same room and dates. Add one book-direct benefit and show it next to the price. Book a room on your own site from a phone and fix the first step where you hesitated. Email past guests before their usual travel season with a reason to book with you, and switch off paid OTA placements on dates you will sell out regardless.

Days 61 to 90, the questions. Write pages on your site that answer the specific questions you found in the first month: who the hotel suits, what is nearby, what is included, the facts guests check before booking. Make sure your name, address, phone number and amenities match on your site, your OTA listings and your Google Business Profile. Keep every OTA listing live and accurate throughout.

At day 90, compare direct share with the same month last year, since seasonality moves channel mix on its own. Put it next to the commission you paid and what you spent to earn the direct bookings. If direct share rose and the total cost fell, keep going and widen the win-back list. If it did not, the five signs above will usually show which part of the plan stalled.