By Konstantin Artemyev

September 24, 2026

Competition between Booking.com, Expedia and other large OTAs is good for travellers and, in many ways, good for hotels. More competition means more reach, more marketing, more technology and more opportunities to sell rooms.

But there is a point where the interests of the platform and the interests of the hotel stop being the same.

According to the HOTREC European Hotel Distribution Study 2026, around 30% of hotel bookings in Europe are made through OTAs. Booking Holdings represents close to 69% of the European OTA market, while Booking Holdings and Expedia Group together account for more than 85%. For an independent hotel, these are not channels that can simply be ignored.

I would not suggest ignoring them anyway. OTAs are often excellent sales channels. They bring visibility, demand, payment infrastructure, international reach and, in many markets, guests the hotel would struggle to acquire on its own.

The question is what happens when competition between the OTAs starts being financed by the hotel.

Booking.com has Genius. Expedia has One Key and its own member rates. There are mobile rates, country rates, seasonal promotions, last-minute deals and other tools designed to make a platform more attractive to the traveller and to increase conversion inside that platform.

From the OTA’s point of view, this is perfectly logical. It wants the guest to open its app first, stay there and complete the booking there rather than with a competitor.

From the hotel’s point of view, the calculation is different.

A discount does not become profitable just because it generates more reservations. What matters is the price left after the discount, the OTA commission and the costs connected with the stay. It also matters whether the guest actually needed the discount in order to book.

Genius is a good example. Booking.com currently makes Genius Level 1 available to travellers simply by creating an account, with participating properties offering at least a 10% discount on selected stays. For the platform, this creates a very large loyalty audience. For the hotel, it means that the discounted rate can be visible to a substantial part of Booking.com demand rather than to a small group of genuinely loyal customers.

I have removed Genius from hotels more than once. Every time, there was understandable nervousness before doing it. The assumption was that bookings would collapse because the hotel would lose access to a large and important segment.

In my experience, that dramatic collapse did not happen.

Guests continued booking. Some paid more. The hotel gave away less ADR. That does not mean Genius is always a bad programme or that every hotel should switch it off. It means that the effect has to be measured rather than assumed.

The same applies to Expedia member discounts and to almost every other promotion offered by an OTA. I am not particularly interested in whether a programme is described as powerful, exclusive or high-converting. I want to know what it does to the hotel’s own numbers.

Does it create additional demand? Does it move demand from another channel? Does it attract a useful segment? Does it fill dates that genuinely need support? What happens to net ADR after the discount and commission? And would some of those guests have booked anyway?

These questions become especially important in seasonal hotels.

I remember one property in Montenegro where off-season demand was weak and the natural reaction was to make the rate increasingly attractive. On paper, the logic looked reasonable: if rooms are empty, a low-paying guest is better than no guest.

But once the discount became deep enough and we added OTA commission, cleaning, utilities and the other costs directly associated with the stay, some reservations were contributing almost nothing and in certain cases effectively became negative business.

In practical terms, part of the guest’s stay was being financed with money earned during the high season.

The hotel was still showing occupancy. Reservations were still arriving. The OTA could point to conversion and production. But the economics for the property were becoming worse.

This is why I am cautious when an OTA suggests solving a demand problem primarily with another discount.

The platform sees its own marketplace. It wants more bookings through that marketplace. It does not manage the hotel’s payroll, energy bills, cleaning costs, distribution mix or annual profit.

The hotel has to do that.

Sometimes the right response to weak demand is a discount. Sometimes the right response is a different rate condition, a different channel, a different market segment or simply accepting that certain dates will have lower occupancy. Sometimes the base price itself is wrong. And sometimes there is no price at which additional demand becomes economically interesting.

None of this makes OTAs the enemy.

I have spent too many years selling hotel rooms through them to take that view. Booking.com, Expedia and other platforms are part of modern hotel distribution, and in many independent hotels they will remain among the most important sales channels.

But a sales channel and a revenue manager are not the same thing.

The OTA can tell the hotel that a promotion may increase visibility or conversion. It cannot decide whether that promotion makes commercial sense for the property. That decision belongs to the hotel and has to be based on its own demand, costs, channel mix and pricing strategy.

An OTA can be an excellent sales channel without being your revenue manager.

A hotel does not have to finance the competition between Booking.com and Expedia with its own ADR.