OTA Commission Rates: Where Your Margin Actually Goes

What OTAs officially charge

The stated commission is the part everyone knows. As of July 2026, Booking.com's standard commission for hotels typically runs about 15–18%, and Expedia around 18–22%, depending on market, property type and any visibility programs. Those are the published ranges — verify your own contract, because they vary by region and change over time.

How much commission does Booking.com take from a hotel? The headline answer is 15–18% — but the headline is where the leak begins, not where it ends.

The reason the published number misleads is that it is charged on a rate you may already have quietly discounted, and it is only the first deduction of several. Two properties on the same channel with the same nominal commission can keep very different amounts, because what actually reaches the bank depends on which promotions were switched on, how many bookings cancelled, and what the payment and currency handling took on the way through. The only honest way to know your real cost of distribution is to measure it on your own reservations, after every deduction — which is exactly what almost no small property has time to do by hand.

The five silent leaks

Beyond the quoted commission, five mechanisms quietly widen the gap between your published rate and what you actually keep. Each is documented industry practice — described here neutrally, not as wrongdoing by any platform.

1 · Genius and loyalty discounts

Loyalty programs layer an extra discount (often 10–20%) on top of your rate to eligible guests. You gain visibility; you also give up net you may not have consciously priced in.

2 · Mobile-only rates

Opt-in mobile rates apply a further cut for bookings on a phone. Easy to switch on and forget, and it compounds with loyalty discounts on the same booking.

3 · Margin "shaving"

Platforms may fund promotions partly from their own margin and partly from yours; the net you receive can end up below the rate the guest appears to pay.

4 · Wholesale rate leakage

Rates distributed to wholesalers can resurface on public channels below your intended floor, eroding both parity and net.

5 · Higher OTA cancellation rates

OTA reservations are cancelled far more often than direct ones — commonly cited at roughly ~50% for some OTA segments versus about ~18% direct (widely reported industry figures, as of July 2026). Every cancelled-then-rebooked night carries cost and risk that the gross commission number never shows.

Case: the discount nobody approved

On a real production property, Omnimetric synced every reservation and compared the net revenue per booking against the property's rate card. A silent OTA discount was quietly giving away roughly a third of the margin — and the engine surfaced it in week one, before a human would have caught it on any monthly report. Correcting it recovered about a third of the lost margin. The property stays anonymous and the figure is exactly as published; the point is the method, not a headline.

Why does week one matter so much? Because the alternative is a monthly report, and a silent discount does not announce itself on a monthly report — it shows up only as revenue that is slightly lower than it should be, spread thin across dozens of bookings, easy to write off as a soft month. By the time a quarter of the pattern is visible in a spreadsheet, a full season of margin can already be gone. Catching it in the first week is possible only because the comparison runs per reservation, automatically, against the rate card — not once a month by hand. The figure here is exactly as published; what generalizes is the method, which surfaces the same class of leak on any property regardless of the number attached to it.

How to audit your own OTA margin

You can do a version of this by hand. Pull your reservations for a period. For each booking, compute the net after commission and payment fees — what actually reached your account — and set it beside your rate card. Then compare channels by net profit per booking, not gross revenue. A rate-parity check tells you when a channel undercuts your published price; only the per-reservation math tells you what each booking truly paid you after every silent leak. How do you check what OTAs really cost your hotel? Booking by booking, on net.

Do this once and the ranking of your channels usually shifts. A channel that looks like your biggest earner on gross revenue can fall behind once you account for its promotions, its cancellation rate and its fees — while a smaller channel, or your own direct bookings, quietly turns out to be worth more per reservation. That is the whole point of the exercise: you cannot manage a channel mix you have only ever measured on gross. The goal is not to punish any platform but to price and prioritise each one for what it actually pays you.

The audit, step by step

1 · Export every reservation for a full month from your PMS — gross rate, channel, and any promotion or loyalty flags. 2 · For each booking, subtract the commission, the payment-processing fee and any mobile or loyalty discount to get the true net that reached your account. 3 · Tag each booking with its channel. 4 · Sum net — not gross — by channel, then divide by the number of bookings to get net profit per reservation for each one. 5 · Rank the channels by that figure. 6 · Repeat next month and watch the ranking move. The first pass is the one that surprises people; the repeat passes are what keep a healthy channel mix from quietly drifting into an unhealthy one. A rate-parity check belongs alongside this, but it answers a narrower question — whether a channel is undercutting your published price — while the per-reservation math answers the one that pays the bills: what each booking is really worth after every deduction has been taken.

Watching it automatically

Doing that by hand every month is the reason it rarely gets done. Omnimetric syncs every reservation, tracks net profit per booking and per channel, and flags anomalies — like a net that falls below what your rate card implies. Its competitor rate radar (eight competitors, twice daily, FX-normalized) also shows when an OTA is undercutting your own direct price. That per-reservation profit view is part of the wider revenue management platform for small hotels, and it is exactly what makes the difference between revenue up and profit up. Running in Indonesia? See hotel revenue management in Bali.

Frequently asked questions

Find your own margin leak

Bring last month's reservations and we'll show you net profit per channel and per booking — and whether a silent discount is quietly taking a cut you never approved.