US hotels have the brands, the apps and the points. The OTAs still take the booking.
Phocuswright's new US market data puts hotels at nearly two-thirds of all OTA gross bookings — in the one country that built its entire lodging industry around brand.com
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. Phocuswright published its US Online Travel Agency Market Essentials 2026 this week. US OTA gross bookings rose 4% in 2025 to $100.3 billion, and OTAs now take about a fifth of all US travel gross bookings, projected to reach 21% by 2028.
Hotels are 63% of that book. Air is 20%, and falling. Whatever else the OTA business is, it is mostly a hotel business.
Why that number is strange. Any hotelier who has sat through a book-direct presentation knows the theory: build the brand, run the app, load the loyalty program, and the guest comes to you instead of the platform.
The US has run that experiment at full scale for two decades, and won it on paper. Roughly seven in ten US hotel rooms belong to a chain. Independents have gone from two-thirds of the market in 1990 to 28% by 2022. Every one of those flags carries a loyalty program counting members in the hundreds of millions, an app, a rate guarantee, and years of advertising telling travelers to book on the brand's own site. In Europe, independents still held around 60% of rooms in 2021.
If brand.com beats the OTA anywhere, it beats it in the United States. That is the most favorable ground the argument will ever get, and hotels there are still the segment the platforms are built on.
The industry next door. Air didn't shrink to a fifth of that book by accident, and it isn't that suppliers can't pull their customers back. Airlines did. Phocuswright puts only 13% of what airlines earn online through an OTA at all, after years of holding capacity tight, raising fares and making the extras worth buying only at their own checkout.
The catch. These are Phocuswright's estimates, in a paywalled report, covering the US only. And 63% is a share of the OTA's business, not of hotels' own bookings — when air retreats, everything left standing gets a bigger slice, so part of that figure is arithmetic rather than growth. The report's own numbers show hotel volume inside the OTA book cooling as US room revenue softens.
What it means for hotels. The advice an independent gets is to build direct. It is good advice and worth doing. But notice where it comes from — an industry whose most heavily branded market, holding every tool the pitch describes, still sends this much volume through the platforms.
Take the direct pitch at its real weight. Brand, app and points did not free the chains from the OTA in the one market built for them, and they will not do it for a forty-key property. What they bought the chains was leverage on the commission, not independence from the channel.
So price the OTA honestly, the way the chains actually do behind the marketing: as paid acquisition, worth it where it reaches a guest you cannot reach yourself, expensive everywhere else.
The most branded hotel market on earth spent twenty years building an alternative to the OTA. It is still two-thirds of the OTA's business.
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