Hotels barely moved OTA share in a decade. The terms did all the moving.
Commissions, parity, payments, search control — the contract behind every booking was rewritten, and the next rewrite is already underway
Mark Vondrasek had real money riding on one figure. As Hyatt's chief commercial officer, half of a stock award depended on the share of bookings coming through Hyatt's own site and app. Between 2023 and 2025, he missed it. That slice of the payout never arrived. Sean O'Neill opens Skift's new retrospective on the direct booking fight right there. A hotel company had tied executive pay to a scoreboard. The scoreboard wouldn't move.
Ten years on from Hilton's "Stop Clicking Around" — roughly $100 million, eighteen countries — the split between direct and OTA-facilitated bookings sits about where it began for the major chains. Marriott ran its own campaign. So did the rest of the field. Loyalty programs swelled, apps got faster, rate guarantees stacked up. The pie chart held.
Read only that line and the decade looks like a stalemate. It wasn't.
What the scoreboard left out
Channel share measures one thing: which door the booking came through. It says nothing about what the booking cost the hotel, or which rules came attached. And the rules never sat still. Commissions came down for operators with the leverage to press. Marketing commitments shifted. Parity obligations — once a broad, quiet constraint reaching past rate into availability and beyond — narrowed, then in places vanished. Onward distribution rights. Payment tools. Whether a hotel could protect its own name in paid search. Each became its own contested line in the contract. The give-and-take ran hot for ten years. It just never showed up in the chart everyone kept open.
Europe settled the matter in law. The European Commission named Booking Holdings a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act in May 2024. Within six months, every parity clause Booking held across the European Economic Area was gone — wide and narrow alike. That fall the Court of Justice ruled, in Case C-264/23, that the clauses don't count as ancillary to how the platform runs, knocking out the defense Booking had leaned on for years. Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, and Portugal had already moved the same way. A hotel selling in the EEA today works under terms that didn't exist in 2016. Channel share barely flickered. The economics felt every bit of it.
The wrong win
Back to Vondrasek's forfeited payout. Paying an executive against channel share assumes share is where the value lives. For ten years, it lived somewhere else — in commission points, in contract clauses, in who held the guest's card and who owned the hotel's name in search. An operator could lose the share fight every quarter and still pull back real margin by rewriting the terms underneath it. Hyatt had bet the bonus on the wrong win.
The commercial teams that read the decade well saw this early. They stopped grading the OTA relationship on commission percentage alone — the percentage was only ever part of the cost, and rarely the real fight. The fight was in payment terms, in parity scope, in keyword bidding on a hotel's own brand, in the slow drift of the guest relationship away from the property. A revenue leader who optimized the headline rate and nothing else spent ten years winning a smaller and smaller argument.
The next set of terms is already being written
None of it is settling. Three forces are already drafting the next contract.
The first is AI. As assistants and agents slot in between the traveler and the booking, the question is not whether hotels get cut out — it's which layer does the intermediating, and on what terms. Google's and Booking's moves point the same direction: a new layer forming upstream of the booking, run by parties no hotel has sat across a table from yet.
The second is the OTAs' turn to B2B. Expedia's fastest-growing business is no longer the consumer site travelers know. In the fourth quarter of 2025, its B2B arm — the engine behind other companies' booking flows, plus its travel-agent platform — grew gross bookings about 24 percent, to roughly $8.7 billion. Ariane Gorin ran that division before she ran the company, and she has built Expedia around it. Booking is going the same way. The commission line a hotel argues over today is a single entry on a distribution map that now runs through partners, payment rails, and white-label engines the guest never sees.
The third barely shows up on the leisure radar at all: corporate and managed travel, where consolidation, fintech, and new B2B distribution are reshaping terms on their own track.
Counted by channel mix, the decade is a draw. Counted by everything the channel mix leaves out, it was one of the busiest stretches in hotel distribution since the OTAs arrived. And it isn't finished. The terms are reopening now — for the AI layer, for the B2B partners, for a corporate-travel market that hasn't had its turn yet.
by Markus Busch, Editor and Publisher of hospitality.today
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