What independent hotels actually lose to OTA commission — and how to find your real rate

Ask most independent owners what they pay the booking platforms and you’ll get a single number: “fifteen percent,” or “eighteen.” It’s the figure on the contract, and it feels like the answer.

It almost never is. The headline rate is the start of the calculation, not the end of it — and the gap between the two is where a surprising amount of profit quietly leaves the building.

The headline rate, and why it understates things

Let’s start with what’s on paper. As of 2026, the major online travel agencies charge independent properties broadly 15% to 25% per booking, depending on platform, location and the boxes you’ve ticked. Booking.com’s base sits around 15%, rising towards 18% once you’re in its membership and visibility programmes. Expedia tends to run higher for independents, often 18% to 22%. Smaller and specialist platforms vary widely on either side.

So far, so familiar. But the contract rate assumes you’ve opted into nothing else — and most properties have.

The costs that don’t appear on the contract

The headline number climbs the moment you start competing for visibility, which on these platforms you almost have to.

Preferred-partner programmes, sponsored placements and visibility boosts all work by adding to your commission in exchange for showing you higher in the results. Use a few of them at once — as properties chasing occupancy routinely do — and industry analysis for 2026 puts the effective rate at 25% to 30% on those bookings. That’s nearly a third of the room revenue gone before you’ve paid for the bed linen.

Then there’s a cost that never shows up as a percentage at all: the guest. When someone books through an OTA, you typically receive limited contact details and little freedom to market to them directly afterwards. The platform, in effect, rents you the guest for one stay and keeps the relationship. A guest who would happily have come back to you directly — at zero commission — instead returns through the platform, and you pay the commission again. And again.

That is the real expense of an over-reliance on OTAs: not just the slice taken from each booking, but the repeat direct booking you never get to make.

How to work out your real rate

Here is a simple exercise worth doing properly, with your own numbers rather than a rule of thumb.

Take a typical OTA booking. Start with the headline commission. Add the cost of any visibility or preferred-placement programmes you’re paying into, expressed as a share of that booking. Then make an honest estimate of repeat value: of the guests who arrive via a platform, how many would realistically have returned directly if you’d owned the relationship — and what is that lost future booking worth?

Put those together and you have your effective cost of an OTA booking, which for many independents lands meaningfully above the contract rate they quote. Do the same for a direct booking — where your cost is essentially your own marketing time and a small payment-processing fee — and the contrast becomes the most useful number in your business.

This isn’t an argument for abandoning the OTAs. They earn their place: they fill rooms in soft periods, they reach travellers who’d never otherwise find you, and they offload distressed last-minute inventory. The goal is not zero OTA bookings. It’s knowing the true price of each channel so you can shift the mix deliberately rather than by default.

What moving the mix is worth

The arithmetic rewards even small shifts. Industry modelling routinely shows that trimming OTA dependence by a handful of percentage points returns serious money to the bottom line over a year, because every booking you convert from platform to direct keeps the commission and opens the door to a direct repeat.

The levers are well understood: a booking experience on your own site that’s genuinely faster and easier than the platform’s; a clear, honest reason to book direct that respects the rate-parity rules you’re bound by; capturing guest details properly so the relationship is yours; and the kind of follow-up that turns a first stay into a second. None of it is dramatic. All of it compounds.

The number worth knowing

If there’s one thing to take from this, it’s that “what do you pay the OTAs” is the wrong question. The right one is: what does a booking actually cost you, by channel, once everything is counted — and what would it be worth to move even a tenth of your bookings from the most expensive channel to the cheapest?

Most owners have never sat down and worked that out, because the day-to-day of running a property doesn’t leave room for it. It’s precisely the kind of calculation — and the strategy that follows from it — that we do on a property’s behalf, quietly, every month.

This piece pairs with our look at how travellers now discover independent hotels through AI assistants — because the channel you’re found through and the channel you’re booked through are, increasingly, the same conversation.

Reserved Hospitality takes complete ownership of booking operations for independent boutique hotels and holiday lets — OTA management, pricing, direct booking growth and the guest relationship — so owners earn more from every room without doing it themselves.