The OTA grip on Europe's hotels didn't tighten — it shifted toward Expedia
HOTREC's 85.4% for Booking Holdings and Expedia matches its last study to the decimal. At brand hotels, Expedia takes a third of OTA bookings.
by Markus Busch
The number. HOTREC, the European hotel association, published its 2026 distribution study on September 15. The line that traveled: Booking Holdings and Expedia Group take 85.4% of OTA bookings in Europe. The release describes that concentration as rising steadily.
The last edition. In July 2024, the same study series, run by the same researcher, Roland Schegg at HES-SO Valais-Wallis, put Booking Holdings at 71.0% of European OTA bookings for 2023 and Expedia at 14.4%. Add them up. 85.4%.
The total held. The shares inside it moved. Booking Holdings slipped to 68.8%. Expedia climbed to 16.6%, back above the 16.3% it had in 2019, after falling to 12.5% in 2021.
The long climb is real, and it is old. Booking Holdings had 60% of European OTA bookings in 2013, and OTAs went from 19.7% of all hotel bookings to 29.9% over twelve years. Over the last two, very little changed. OTAs were just under 30% in 2023 as well. Direct bookings sat at 50.9% then and 51.3% now.
Where Expedia is winning. The study places Expedia's strength with larger hotels, chain properties, city hotels, upscale hotels and business-oriented houses. Ten European hotel groups pooled data for 831 properties. In that group, Expedia accounts for about a third of OTA bookings, Booking Holdings for 56.3%, and the two together for almost 94%. Across independent hotels, Booking Holdings alone takes 69.4%.
Two different invoices, then. At an independent, seven of every ten OTA bookings still come through one company. At the brand hotels in the study, one in three comes from Expedia, and only about six in a hundred come from anyone outside the pair. Any commercial lead can check her own property against those figures this week, with twelve months of commission statements.
What did move for everyone. Rate undercutting. In 2023, four in ten hotels said OTAs sold their rooms below the price they had set. Now 51% say it happens frequently or occasionally, and 80% of those who answered the follow-up say they never agreed to the lower price. The study finds the size of the discounts roughly stable. It is happening more often, not cutting deeper.
Limits. The individual-hotel figures are survey answers from 1,882 hotels reached through national associations, self-reported, with Italy and Germany supplying close to half. The median respondent has 39 rooms. The chain figures are the ten groups' own data. The 2023 shares come from the previous edition, and weighting can shift between editions. HOTREC released the study while asking Brussels to enforce the Digital Markets Act and to keep the Platform-to-Business Regulation, which the Commission has proposed repealing.
Two companies still take almost all of Europe's OTA business. Which of the two matters more depends on what kind of hotel you run.
Read also: We keep winning. Nothing changes.
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