By Konstantin Artemyev

September 24, 2026

Rate parity was one of the main points of conflict between hotels and large OTAs about fifteen years ago. Hotels wanted the freedom to sell cheaper through their own channels, while OTAs insisted on the same rates and conditions everywhere. After a series of court decisions and regulatory changes in Europe, it might seem that this debate is largely over and rate parity is no longer something we need to think about.

I see it differently. For me, rate parity is not mainly about the relationship between a hotel and Booking.com, and it is not really about whether OTA commissions are fair. I see it as part of the sales process — one small part of the journey a guest takes from the first search to the final booking.

The legal situation has changed. In Europe, Booking.com can no longer require rate parity in the way it once did. Under the Digital Markets Act, hotels can offer better rates or conditions through their own website or other channels. There were also real reasons in the past to worry that a lower rate elsewhere could affect a hotel's position on an OTA. Research published by ZEW in 2019, based on Booking.com and Expedia data from 2016–2017, found such a relationship. But that belongs to a different period and a different regulatory environment, so today I would not use fear of an algorithm penalty as an argument for rate parity.

My main reason is much simpler: by the time a guest compares final prices, most of the work has already been done.

OTAs are still one of the main shop windows of the hotel market. They are convenient because a traveller can compare many hotels in one place: location, room types, photos, reviews, conditions and prices. Research into booking behaviour also shows that OTAs are often part of the customer journey even when the booking is eventually completed directly with the hotel.

I tend to see this process as a funnel. At the beginning, a traveller may look at dozens of hotels in a destination. Then the choice becomes smaller. Eventually, there may be only two or three serious options left. After that, the guest may search the hotel name on Google, visit the official website, look at the rooms again and check the final price. The fact that someone has reached the official website usually means that a large part of the decision has already been made.

This is exactly the moment when I do not want to give the guest another problem to solve.

If Booking.com shows one price, Expedia another, Airbnb a third, and a metasearch site produces several more, a simple decision suddenly becomes a new research project. Why is this one cheaper? Is it really the same room? Are the conditions different? Is there an even better rate somewhere else? Should I keep looking?

At some point, this becomes a form of analysis paralysis. More choice no longer helps the guest make a decision. It starts to delay the decision.

There is also something hotel owners and managers sometimes need to remember. We may love our hotel. We may have spent years building it and put a great deal of time, money and personal energy into it. But for the guest, it is still one hotel among many.

A traveller does not have to investigate our distribution system or understand why the same room has five different prices. If the process becomes confusing enough, the guest can simply close the tabs and book another hotel where everything is easier to understand.

This is why I prefer public OTA rates to be the same, or at least very close. Not because Booking.com or Expedia deserve special treatment, but because I see very little commercial value in moving a guest from one OTA to another just to save a few percentage points. The audiences of different OTAs may overlap, but they are not identical, and deliberately making one OTA cheaper than another rarely creates much value for the hotel.

The hotel's own website is a different matter.

A guest who finds the official website after seeing the hotel on an OTA has already taken an extra step. At this point, direct booking should have a clear advantage. But I do not think that advantage needs to be dramatic.

A Best Available Rate with a small direct discount can often be enough. Five percent, for example, clearly shows that booking direct makes sense. I would see 10% more as an upper limit than as a normal starting point.

I am also not convinced that most guests will calculate the exact saving. What matters is that the situation looks clear: this is the official hotel website, the rate is slightly better, there is a proper booking engine, and the reservation can be completed immediately in a few clicks.

If the website instead says “send us an email for the best rate” or asks the guest to send a request and wait for a reply, a small price advantage does not help much. Direct booking only works when we avoid creating another obstacle at the final stage. In practical terms, the guest usually does not care where the reservation is completed, as long as the price makes sense, the conditions are clear and the booking process is easy.

There is, however, another rate parity problem that a hotel may not create itself at all: rate leakage through B2B distribution.

The mechanism is quite simple. A hotel gives a partner a special wholesale or B2B rate, expecting another margin to be added before the room reaches the final customer. But the distribution chain can become much longer. One intermediary supplies another, which supplies another. Somewhere in the chain, somebody accepts a smaller margin, and eventually a rate that was never intended for public sale appears online below the hotel's own price.

When I worked with larger hotels, I regularly checked metasearch sites for exactly this reason, and I still do. I am interested not only in who is selling the room cheaper, but in where that rate came from, how it travelled through the distribution chain and which partner was the original source. Once that is clear, it becomes possible to speak to the relevant channel and try to stop the leakage.

For me, this kind of disparity is much more problematic than a deliberate small discount on the hotel's own website. The hotel receives no real commercial advantage from it. The guest simply sees a confusing collection of prices and once again has to wonder why the same room costs one amount in one place and much less somewhere else.

This is also why I look at B2B partners not only in terms of how much business they can generate, but also in terms of how clearly and responsibly they control the onward distribution of hotel rates.

In the end, rate parity is not about making every price exactly the same down to the last euro. For me, it is mainly about how many additional decisions we ask a guest to make at the moment when they are almost ready to book.

If someone has chosen the hotel, likes the room, accepts the price and is almost ready to enter their card details, I would rather not give them new reasons to stop and reconsider everything.

If we are the ones who stop the guest at the door and ask them to think again about why the price behind this door is different from the price behind the next one, we should not be surprised if they eventually choose a completely different door.