The death of lazy hotel distribution
Tomorrow's travel front door doesn't care what you pay. It cares what you are.
A hotelier in Berlin told me last week what it costs to hold a top-three position on Booking.com for his city: roughly half the room rate. Not as a single commission line — Booking.com's base rate still hovers around 15 percent — but as the stacked total of Preferred Partner fees, Visibility Booster surcharges, Genius discounts, and Sponsored Ads. Layer them on top of each other, and fifty cents of every euro disappear before the guest checks in.
The number sounds extreme. It isn't. Booking.com's own Visibility Booster allows commission rates up to 60 percent for high-competition dates. The Preferred Plus program pushes base commissions to 25–30 percent. Add a Genius discount that shaves another 10–20 percent off the displayed rate, and the math lands exactly where the Berlin hotelier said it does. This is the cost of lazy distribution — handing your entire inventory to one platform, paying whatever it takes to stay visible, and running your hundred-room hotel with five employees who can barely answer the phone, let alone build guest relationships or maintain a coherent presence anywhere else.
The model that worked until it didn't
For years, Booking.com's ranking algorithm was essentially a commission auction: pay more, rank higher, fill rooms. Crude, but legible. Hotels that didn't want to think about distribution could write a check and let the platform do the rest. The more they paid, the more visible they became. Strategy was optional.
That model is now being undermined by the very technology Booking.com is betting its future on. The company is pouring hundreds of millions into what it calls Agentic AI — systems that autonomously rebook flights, build itineraries, and match travelers to properties based on conversational intent. The AI Trip Planner, now live in over ten countries, lets users describe what they want in natural language — "quiet design hotel near Tiergarten" or "family-friendly place with a pool and gluten-free breakfast" — and surfaces results based on content quality, review sentiment, and metadata. Not on who pays the highest commission.
Two operating systems, one platform
This creates a structural split inside Booking.com itself. The old ranking system rewards spending. The new AI layer rewards substance. Hotels with rich, accurate descriptions, strong review profiles, and distinctive positioning get surfaced. Hotels with thin content and poor service records don't — regardless of how much they pour into visibility boosters.
And the disruption doesn't stop at Booking.com's borders. As many as one in three travelers now say they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews to plan trips before they ever open an OTA. These systems recommend hotels based on what the open web says about them: structured website content, review quality across multiple platforms, local context, clear positioning. They charge no commission — yet. But they require something the lazy distribution model never demanded — that the hotel actually be good at communicating what it is.
The paradox
Here lies the uncomfortable truth. The hotels paying 50 percent commission to Booking.com are typically the ones least equipped to compete in an AI-driven discovery environment. They have neglected their websites. They have ignored review management. They have no content strategy, no clear brand voice, no structured data. They outsourced their entire market presence to a platform and are now discovering that the platform itself is moving toward a system that punishes exactly that kind of passivity.
The escape hatch exists. But it doesn't look like switching from one OTA to another. It looks like investing in the fundamentals that make a hotel legible to machines: clean structured content, consistent review engagement, a direct web presence that answers the questions AI systems are learning to ask. It looks like diversifying into distribution channels — GDS, direct, metasearch — where the economics don't require handing over half the room rate. And yes, it looks like hiring the sixth employee.
The verdict
The smartest distribution dollar a hotel can spend in 2026 isn't on Booking.com's Visibility Booster. It's on making the property worth recommending — to humans and algorithms alike. The age of buying visibility without earning it is ending. Commission bought you a ranking. It never bought you a reputation.
by Markus Busch, Editor and Publisher of Hospitality.today
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