The Booking.com cost that isn't commission

Most hotels count the commission. Eight years of incidents say they should also be counting what happens when Booking.com breaks

Ask a hotelier what Booking.com costs them, and you'll hear a number between 15% and 20%. Commission. It shows up on every invoice and every channel-mix discussion.

That's the cost hoteliers can see. There is another one, and the last eight years have made it hard to ignore.

What the record shows

In 2018, scammers called hotels pretending to be Booking.com and tricked staff into handing over access. They used what they got to steal data from more than four thousand guests. Booking.com told the regulator twenty-two days late. The Dutch authority fined the company €475,000.

In 2023, Booking.com's payment system stopped sending money to hotels for weeks. In some cases, months. The Guardian found one hotel operator in Thailand who waited six months for money Booking.com had already collected from his guests. He lost his property. Hungarian authorities raided Booking.com's local office. Hotels in Tokyo prepared a lawsuit to get paid.

Through 2024 and 2025, scammers kept breaking into hotel extranet accounts and messaging guests from inside the platform — asking for new credit card details, threatening to cancel the booking. UK fraud reports recorded 532 of these cases, worth around £370,000 in confirmed guest losses.

In April 2026, Booking.com told customers their data had been accessed again — names, phone numbers, booking details, messages with the hotel. The company has not said how many guests were affected.

Four different problems. Four times the same ending. Booking.com kept the commission. The regulator got the fine. The hotel got the mess.

Why it keeps ending the same way

Any one of these could be called bad luck. Four of them, spread across eight years, across four unrelated types of problem, is something else.

The reason the ending is always the same is simple. Booking.com gets paid the moment a guest clicks "book." Everything that happens after that — the guest's data, the payment flow, the message from a scammer pretending to be the hotel — happens after Booking.com has already earned its money. So when things go wrong later, the person who has to deal with it is the hotel.

This isn't about bad intentions. It's about how the system is built. When the company that runs the platform doesn't pay when the platform fails, the failures don't stop.

What hotels are actually paying

When a guest gets scammed by someone using real booking data, the guest blames the hotel first. The refund pressure lands on the hotel. So does the bad review. So does the phone call from the angry family who arrived at check-in convinced they'd already paid twice.

When Booking.com's payment system freezes, the hotel still has to pay staff, suppliers, and rent. Nobody compensates for the weeks of cash flow stuck inside Booking.com.

When a breach announcement goes out, the hotel is the one answering guest questions for the next month.

None of these costs show up on a Booking.com invoice. All of them are real. And all of them have happened more than once.

The number that's missing

Most hotels price Booking.com by the commission alone. That's the easy number, but it's not the full number.

The full number includes what it costs when Booking.com breaks. And the record is clear enough now that "it won't happen to me" is not a plan.

Hotels can't simply leave Booking.com — that's true. But knowing the real cost of being on it changes other decisions. How much to invest in direct bookings. How much cash to keep on hand. How much to spend on training staff to spot scams. Whether to rely on a single channel for most of the revenue.

The commission is on every spreadsheet. The rest of the cost should be there too.

by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today

Enjoying this analysis? Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →