The last pricing control you own is the one you spend least on
Four in ten hoteliers set their rate by gut feel or on a spreadsheet. It's the one price Booking.com doesn't set for them.
by Markus Busch
What's still yours. Our series on hotels losing pricing control made three points. Booking.com decides what your room sells for on its site. Ask ChatGPT or Google what a night at your hotel costs, and the answer often quotes the OTA. And the channel is taking over the upsell.
One thing is still yours: the rate you load. Your OTA payout is based on it. Your own website charges it. Every price a guest sees starts there.
Who sets it. RoomPriceGenie sells pricing software to independent hotels. In October it published a survey of 450 hoteliers in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
14% set their rates by gut feel or fixed seasonal rates. Another 29% use a spreadsheet and last year's numbers. That's more than four in ten with no pricing system at all.
At half of the gut-feel hotels, the owner decides the rate. A quarter of them look ahead at demand once a year or less.
The spreadsheet hotels work harder. Only 18% say it's quick to pull the numbers together before a rate change. You know the picture. Extranet open, PMS open, a rate-check tab, last year's file. Then a decision on what Saturday costs.
TakeUp, another pricing-software company, found the same in 2025. Half of nearly 200 U.S. independents changed prices by hand, season by season. Three in four spent one to six hours a week on it.
What you pay for the controls you lost. The OTA invoice comes every month. Nobody asks whether to pay it. Metasearch bids, the channel manager, the booking engine fee: each one is a line in the budget.
At four in ten hotels, the rate all of them depend on gets a spreadsheet or a gut call, and whatever time the GM has left after the morning meeting.
Where the hours should go. On an OTA booking, your rate decides what you keep. On a direct booking, it is the price. So work out what you actually keep from each channel after commission, and set your rate with that in mind. Nobody else will do it for you.
A pricing system can carry part of the work. So can three hours a week in your calendar, kept like any other meeting.
What the survey doesn't show. It comes from a company that sells pricing software. It includes chains, pubs and hostels as well as independents. And it shows how hotels set prices, not what that earns them. RoomPriceGenie says its customers grew room revenue 19%, but those are its own customers, so it proves nothing here.
Booking.com, the AI answer and the channel each set part of your price. At four in ten hotels, the part they all start from is still set by gut feel or on a spreadsheet.
Read also: Hotel distribution in 2026: The OTAs still sell your rooms
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