How to get more direct bookings when you’re not allowed to be cheaper

There is a piece of advice that appears in almost every article written about direct bookings, and for a hotel in Paris or Madrid it is now perfectly good advice. For your property in the UK, it may still be a breach of contract.

The advice is simple enough: put a lower rate on your own website than the one the platform shows, and let the arithmetic do the rest. It is the most intuitive lever an owner has. Whether you can use it depends on your platform agreement, the offer and the country where you operate.

The right your European competitors got, and you didn’t

In May 2024 the European Commission designated Booking Holdings a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act. Six months later, on 14 November 2024, the obligations took effect. Booking must now, in the Commission’s own words, allow hotels “to offer better prices and conditions on other online channels, including their own websites, than those offered on Booking.com”.

Booking Holdings duly complied. Its own compliance report records that it “removed all parity requirements throughout the EEA”, and that partners no longer have to give Booking.com rates as good as those they publish anywhere else.

Read that phrase again: throughout the EEA. The United Kingdom is not in the EEA. The change was scoped precisely to EEA-based travel offerings, and a property in Cornwall or the Cotswolds sits outside it.

The UK's history is different. The CMA’s monitoring page records the removal of wide parity requirements by Booking.com and Expedia in 2015, with continued commitments confirmed in 2020. These let hotels differentiate offers across OTAs. That history should not be read as blanket permission to change every direct offer.

The CMA page records the history of those commitments; it does not replace a review of your current contract. Check your partner agreement and applicable rules before changing public rates, package benefits or availability. Do not assume that a change announced for the EEA applies to a UK property.

Most direct bookings were never made on your website

Here is where the conversation usually goes wrong. “Direct booking” has quietly become shorthand for “booking engine”, and the two are not the same thing at all.

HOTREC, the European hospitality confederation, has tracked hotel distribution for over a decade. In its 2024 European Hotel Distribution Study, covering 2023, the unweighted sample of 2,394 observations reported these shares of overnight stays: telephone 16.4%, email 15.8%, the property’s own real-time booking engine 12.1%, contact forms 5.9% and walk-ins 3.5%. These are sample averages, not a forecast for a particular hotel.

The single largest direct channel is a phone call. Email is second. The booking engine (the thing most owners picture when they say “direct”, and the thing they spend money on) comes third, at roughly one booking in eight. The study spans European hotels of every size rather than UK independents specifically, so treat it as a shape rather than a forecast for your property. The shape is still striking.

The practical lesson is to look beyond checkout conversion. Make the telephone and email easy to find, answer booking questions promptly, and check which offers your agreement permits in each channel.

The levers you actually have

Even where your public room price must stay the same, there is useful work to do.

Check whether a genuine returning-guest or members’ offer is permitted and how it must be presented. Do the same for telephone offers. These are questions for your actual agreement, not assumptions to borrow from another hotel. Regardless of the rate, a clear contact route and a prompt, helpful answer make it easier to book directly.

Then there is everything that is not the rate. Some agreements also address conditions or availability, so check package benefits as well as the headline price. The upgrade, the late checkout, the breakfast, the parking space, the flexible cancellation the platform won’t match, the note on the file that says how this guest takes their coffee: each can be a reason to choose the property directly when it is genuinely available and permitted. Two identical prices are not two identical offers, and the honest version of “book direct” was always about the offer rather than the number. It is also, not coincidentally, the part a platform cannot copy.

And there is a free shelf that almost no independent uses. Since March 2021 Google has carried free hotel booking links: your own rate, shown beside the OTAs, at no cost per click, and open to “all partner types, from individual hotels to online travel agents”. The catch is plumbing rather than money: you cannot simply switch them on, but must connect through Google’s Hotel Center or a certified connectivity partner, which for most small properties means their channel manager or booking engine. It is a real gap in the market, sitting unclaimed largely because it looks technical.

Do not take your listings down

None of this is an argument for leaving the platforms, and that is worth saying plainly, because the direct-booking conversation attracts absolutists. The most careful research on the question is still Cornell’s. In 2009 Chris Anderson cycled four hotels on and off Expedia and measured what happened to the bookings that did not come through Expedia. They rose. For the one independent property in the study, non-OTA reservations ran 26% higher while it was listed: the platform was working as a billboard, sending people who then went on to book elsewhere.

Four properties is a small study, and its author says so. The branded hotels in it produced messier numbers than the independent one. But the direction has held up well enough that the effect kept its name, and it should temper any instinct to delist. The listing is doing work that never shows up in the listing’s own figures. The goal was never zero OTA bookings; it is knowing what each channel really costs you, then moving the mix on purpose rather than by default.

The part that compounds

A direct booking is worth more than the commission it saves, and the extra worth is the part that arrives later: the guest’s details, the opportunity to ask for appropriate marketing permission, and a route to a future stay.

That is the quiet argument for doing this work even where you cannot compete on price. The rate on the page is one night’s margin. The relationship behind it is every night after. Which is why the unglamorous parts tend to outperform the clever ones: answering the phone, capturing the details properly, following up after checkout, keeping reviews and replies in good order.

None of it is dramatic. It rarely is. But the property that quietly assembles the whole set (the closed-group rate, the answered phone, the offer worth choosing, the free listing on Google, the platform left to do its billboard work) ends up with a direct channel that a lower number on a website could never have bought it.

That balance is why deliberate OTA management and a strong direct channel belong in the same plan: one earns reach, while the other protects the relationship and the margin after discovery.

Reserved Hospitality manages booking operations for independent boutique hotels and holiday lets (OTA listings, pricing, direct booking growth and the guest relationship), so owners earn more from every room without doing it themselves. Parity obligations vary by platform, contract and country, and this is a description of the landscape reviewed on 8 September 2026 rather than legal advice: check your own partner agreement before changing a rate.