Travel agencies grew hotel bookings twice as fast as the OTAs

Commissionable room nights rose 11.8% in the first half. The commission per night rose 0.8% — everywhere else in distribution, growth is the thing that gets repriced

by Markus Busch

Pull your agency commission line for the first half and set it next to last year's. It's bigger — about 13% bigger on a like-for-like property base. Now look at your rate card. Same commission terms, same consortia agreements, nobody renegotiated anything upward. The line grew anyway, and it grew for one reason.

What the figures show. Onyx CenterSource, which processes commission payments between hotels and travel agencies, supplied Hospitality.today with a like-for-like read on the half. Across the same property base in both periods, commissionable room nights rose 11.8% year over year. ADR on those nights rose 1.4%. The average commission paid per commissionable room night rose 0.8%. Multiply the nights by the commission on each one and you have the line your controller reconciles: roughly 13% more paid out to agencies, almost none of it price.

The figures are unpublished and were provided on request, by a company paid on the commission volume it processes. Onyx reads its own data as strong volume-driven growth, with pricing and commission value per room night holding relatively stable.

What the OTAs sold over the same months. In the first quarter, Booking Holdings grew room nights 6% year over year. Expedia Group also grew 6%. Booking guided the second quarter lower still, and both companies report it this week.

So the commissioned agency channel grew at roughly twice the rate of the two companies most hoteliers treat as the market.

What that growth costs everywhere else. Now set the 0.8% against the rest of your mix. On Expedia, you move up the results by offering a bigger commission on each booking. On Booking, Visibility Booster and Preferred Partner do the same work with a slider and a badge. On Google, more visibility is a higher bid. Inside the AI answer, Google has started selling placement outright.

Every one of those is built so more volume arrives at a higher unit cost. By design. Growth and price are wired together there, and the wire runs one way.

The agency channel delivered almost 12% more nights at 0.8% more per night. That commission sits in a contract you signed, at a percentage you can read, and it stayed where it was while the volume moved.

Your commission line grew because more people booked you through an agency, not because anyone charged you more for the privilege. That has become unusual enough to be worth checking against every other channel on the sheet.

Read also: The OTA is not your competitor on Google · Expedia shows you the price of moving up its results before you pay it

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