Hotel distribution in 2026: The OTAs still sell your rooms
Their share barely moved. What changed: you wait for your money, and the last word on your price is theirs.
by Markus Busch
In January, the trend lists for 2026 said hotel distribution would fragment. Messaging apps, super-apps and new OTA models would open new ways to book, and hotels would have more doors to watch.
The doors that carry the bookings stayed where they were. HOTREC, the European hotel association, published its distribution study in September. OTAs took 29.9% of hotel bookings in 2025, about the same as two years earlier. Direct bookings went from 50.9% to 51.3%. In the US, SiteMinder's ranking of channels by booking volume put Expedia Group first, Booking.com second and the hotel's own website third.
So the OTAs sell about the same share of your rooms as before. What moved this year is who decides what the guest pays for them. Booking.com's parent now holds the guest's money on most of what it sells, and Booking.com can price the room below your rate. One of the big chains now lowers its own website's price automatically to match. And a growing part of OTA bookings is resold by companies the hotel has never signed with, at prices they set.
The share held, and Expedia gained inside it
Inside the OTA share, one company moved. HOTREC puts Expedia at 16.6% of European OTA bookings in 2025, up from 12.5% in 2021. Booking Holdings slipped from 71.0% in 2023 to 68.8%. Together the two still hold 85.4%, the same total as two years ago.
The gain sits with the bigger hotels. At 831 properties of ten European hotel groups, Expedia takes about a third of OTA bookings. Across independent hotels, Booking Holdings alone takes 69.4%. In the US, SiteMinder's ranking put Expedia first by booking volume for the first time since 2021. In the second quarter, Expedia sold 6% more room nights than a year earlier. Booking Holdings sold 5% more, on nearly three times the volume.
That is the share story of 2026: flat overall, a little more Expedia at the brand hotels, Booking.com still dominant at the independents. The price story moved further.
Booking Holdings takes the guest's money on 73% of its bookings
Booking Holdings reports two kinds of bookings. In one, the guest pays the hotel, and the hotel sends the commission. In the other, the company collects the payment and pays the hotel later, minus its commission and a payment fee.
In the second quarter, April to June, the second kind grew 14.5%, to $37.0 billion. Bookings where the guest pays the hotel fell 3.3%, to $14.0 billion. The company behind Booking.com, Priceline and Agoda now takes the guest's money first on 73% of what it sells, up from 69% a year earlier. In HOTREC's survey, 65% of hotels use Booking.com's payment service.
The guest arrives having paid someone else. The hotel waits for its money, usually until after she checks out.
Booking.com sets the price the guest sees
Holding the payment lets Booking.com decide the price. Under its Booking Sponsored Benefit, open to hotels that use its payment service, Booking.com can show a room below the rate the hotel loaded and cover the difference itself. Its partner help page puts it plainly: "your rates appear lower on our platform than the rate you set." We covered how that works in September.
Hotels see it on their own listings. In HOTREC's study, 51% say OTAs sell their rooms below their own rate frequently or occasionally, up from about four in ten two years earlier. Of those who answered the follow-up, 80% say they never agreed to the lower price.
Booking.com also decides who gets the better offer. Its Genius members at the two higher levels book more than half of Booking.com's room nights, the company said in August. At participating hotels, their discount, breakfast or upgrade is funded by the hotel.
Radisson's website now follows the OTA's price
For a decade, the OTA watched the hotel's website. Parity clauses stopped a hotel from selling cheaper direct than on Booking.com. Europe has banned those clauses country by country since 2015, and the Digital Markets Act has barred Booking.com from using them since late 2024.
This year the watching turned around. In July, Radisson made its best-rate guarantee automatic across more than 1,600 hotels. Its system checks Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda and five other sites, and lowers the price on Radisson's own website when it finds a cheaper one. The hotel's direct price now follows the OTA's.
The resale price is set by someone else
The OTA bookings growing fastest are sold under someone else's name. Expedia's business-to-business side, which supplies rooms to banks' travel portals, airlines, travel agents and corporate booking tools, grew 21% in the second quarter, to $10.7 billion. That is almost a third of everything Expedia sold. Its consumer brands grew 8%.
Booking Holdings is building the same business, as we reported in July. Its system lets those partners add their own markups, under what it calls "pricing and margin controls." The hotel's contract is with the OTA. The price on the screen can belong to a bank or an airline.
The limits
HOTREC's figures come from 1,882 hotels that answered a survey distributed by national hotel associations; the brand-hotel figures are the ten groups' own data. SiteMinder ranks channels among hotels that use its software. Booking Holdings and Expedia report for the whole company, worldwide, hotels and rental homes together.
Since the European Commission's review on September 28, which we covered then, hotels in the European Economic Area get reservation-level data from Booking.com on how the Sponsored Benefit affects their bookings. The commitments cover only the EEA, and Booking.com has not said whether hotels elsewhere, including in the US, get the same data.
A quarter in 2019, three quarters now
In the second quarter of 2019, Booking Holdings collected the guest's money on about one booking in four. On the rest, the guest paid the hotel, and the hotel sent the commission. In the second quarter of 2026, the company collected it on nearly three in four.
The commission line on the invoice looks the same as it did then. Now the hotel waits for its money, and Booking.com has the last word on what the guest pays for your room.
Read also: Hotel distribution in 2026: Google still sends the guest
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