Hotel Booking Channels in Europe, Country by Country: What HOTREC's 2026 Study Shows and Where It Goes Silent

Sources: OTA partner documentation, the HOTREC European Hotel Distribution Study 2026, EU regulator and court records, vendor research and OTALift review-intake aggregates. Last reviewed: {{last_reviewed}}.

Key takeaways

Hotel booking channels in Europe split 51.3% direct and 29.9% OTA by overnights in 2025, according to HOTREC's 2026 study, the best public dataset on European hotel distribution¹. Direct share runs from 36.6% in Spain to 64.0% in Italy², and Expedia Group's slice of a country's OTA bookings runs from 7.8% in Slovakia to 33.6% in Sweden³.

Then the silence. HOTREC tabulates 13 countries. Poland, the UK, Turkey, Romania and others are pooled into one "Rest of Europe" column or absent². I checked our own review data where it reaches: Expedia is 3.9% of Booking.com plus Expedia reviews across 14 Polish properties⁴. That is a pipeline sample, not a market share.

So benchmark against your country row and your size row, and read the answer as a range. The steps are in the fix section below.

Key numbers

• Direct channels generated 51.3% of European hotel overnights in 2025 and OTAs 29.9%, weighted by Eurostat overnights and excluding chain data¹.
• OTAs' share of European hotel overnights rose from 19.7% in 2013 to 29.9% in 2025, while direct fell from 57.6% to 51.3%¹.
• Direct share spans 27.4 points by country: Italy 64.0% (n=539) against Spain 36.6% (n=49)².
• Booking.com is 66.1% of OTA bookings in HOTREC's unweighted sample and Expedia Group 16.6%³.
• Independents and chains lean on OTAs about equally (30.8% against 31.5% of overnights), but Booking.com is 69.4% of an independent's OTA business and 56.3% of a chain's⁵.

Why the country matters more than the European average

HOTREC's figures are hotels' own reported channel shares, recruited through national associations and weighted to Eurostat overnights⁶. A Kraków owner who benchmarks hotel distribution in Europe against "51% direct" is comparing herself with a blend. Italy, France, Germany and Spain carry 59.6% of HOTREC's weighting². None of those markets looks like Poland, and the study does not pretend otherwise: "No common European trajectory is observed."⁷ Rankings and visibility on each platform are a separate lever; see how OTA ranking algorithms work.

What percentage of hotel bookings in Europe come from OTAs?

OTAs account for about 30% of European hotel overnights: 29.9% in 2025 on HOTREC's weighted basis, up from 19.7% in 2013¹. Direct fell from 57.6% to 51.3%¹. With ten chains folded in, OTAs are 28.2% and direct 49.7%⁸. The unweighted sample reads 27.8% and 56.4%², so one study gives three defensible answers. Countries diverge: Hungary's OTA share roughly doubled from 19.1% to 39.8% between 2013 and 2025, while France barely moved, 24.8% to 25.5%⁷. Greece lost 14.6 points of direct share⁹.

Which European country has the highest share of direct hotel bookings?

Italy, at 64.0% of overnights (n=539), with Spain lowest at 36.6% (n=49), a 27.4-point spread². Finland reads 62.7% but on only 41 hotels, so treat it as indicative. Italy's trend table prints 64.1%; the p.16 channel table prints 64.0%, which this article uses⁹.

How much of Europe's OTA business does Booking.com have?

Booking.com holds 66.1% of OTA bookings in HOTREC's 2026 European sample, Booking Holdings 68.8% and Expedia Group 16.6%³. That table is unweighted, and Italy (30% of responses) and Germany (18%) dominate it. Multiply it by the weighted OTA share and Booking.com holds about 19.8% of all overnights. That is my arithmetic across two bases, not a HOTREC figure.

Which countries does HOTREC not cover?

HOTREC publishes a channel table for only 13 of the 28 countries that answered its 2026 survey (1,882 hotels), and an OTA-mix table for 15²³⁶. Norway's column rests on 11 hotels, so I skip it. Fifteen respondent countries have no column of their own (among them Turkey, Poland, Romania, the UK, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland and Belgium). HOTREC does not list the members of its pooled "Rest of Europe" column, 157 hotels and 19.4% of the weighting², so I can't say which of them it holds. It is not a country.

Do independent hotels depend more on OTAs than chains?

No: independent hotels take 30.8% of overnights through OTAs and chains 31.5%⁵. The difference is which OTA. Booking.com is 69.4% of an independent's OTA business against 56.3% of a chain's, and Expedia.com is 12.0% against 23.6%⁵. Place beats ownership: big-city hotels run 42.2% OTA, mountain hotels 22.4%⁵.

Does the DMA let hotels undercut Booking.com?

Inside the EEA, Booking.com's own terms no longer forbid it. The European Commission says Booking.com "has removed these requirements from its General Delivery Terms", with full removal of contractual parity in July 2024¹⁰. In September 2024 the EU Court of Justice found it had not been established that wide or narrow parity clauses are objectively necessary¹¹. Spain's regulator fined Booking.com EUR 413.24 million that year, and as of the last report I found (March 2025) a court had suspended it pending appeal¹².

Outside the EEA (the UK, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine) I found no source for Booking's current terms and will not infer them. See rate parity fundamentals.

What "great" looks like: hotel booking channels in Europe, 13 country rows

A good reading uses three rows from one study, says which, and ends with an action. The table merges two HOTREC tables: the OTA share of hotel overnights by country (weighted, chains excluded) and the platform split of OTA bookings (unweighted). The bases differ, so do not multiply across a row. Confidence follows the smaller sample: High is n of 100 or more, Medium 60-99, Low under 60.

Country	Direct %	OTA %	Booking.com, % of OTA	Expedia Group, % of OTA	Confidence
Italy	64.0	21.1	64.7	14.4	High
Germany	59.7	31.9	69.2	11.1	High
Switzerland	58.6	29.3	71.2	15.4	High
Sweden	54.4	30.8	58.3	33.6	High
Greece	40.3	27.0	67.9	17.0	High
Austria	59.9	25.9	73.3	10.8	Medium
France	56.2	25.5	64.8	25.1	Medium
Hungary	44.6	39.8	67.4	12.3	Medium
Spain	36.6	35.2	56.1	23.8	Low
Finland	62.7	24.0	68.0	19.4	Low
Slovakia	55.2	26.0	73.3	7.8	Low
Netherlands	40.7	43.0	61.3	17.9	Low
Europe	51.3	29.9	66.1	16.6	Mixed bases

HOTREC's bar charts print different Expedia Group values than its table for several countries (Greece 23.6 against 17.0). I use the table, which sums to its total row³. Belgium (Expedia Group 35.8%, n=16), Ireland (25.6%, n=35) and Slovenia have a platform split but no channel table, and are too thin to rank; Ireland's n=35 sits at HOTREC's gray threshold.

Example 1: a 45% OTA share in Budapest (constructed reading)

This hotel is invented to show the method. A 40-room independent in Budapest finds that 45% of its overnights came through OTAs and asks whether that is high. The Hungary row says 39.8% (n=64). HOTREC's room-size cut says 27.7% for 20-50 rooms, and its city cut says 42.2% above 250,000 people⁵. So the answer is a range of 28% to 42%, and this hotel sits above all of it.

Booking.com is 67.4% of Hungarian OTA bookings and Expedia.com 11.2% (Expedia Group 12.3%)³. Above range, the lever is direct: booking-engine conversion and Google free booking links. When you do touch OTA settings, Booking is the bigger lever, so start there.

Example 2: Greece and Spain, two shapes the average hides

Greece reads direct 40.3%, OTA 27.0%, and tour operators and travel agencies 25.4% of overnights (n=128)². An island hotel that benchmarks direct against OTA alone misses a quarter of its market. Spain's 35.2% OTA share leaves out the ten chains that sent aggregated data; with them folded in, it drops to 24.7%⁸. Only 49 Spanish hotels answered, so read 35% as plausible, not as a verdict.

Example 3: markets with no HOTREC table

No 2026 table exists for these, so every row is a fallback from an older or different source, labelled by year and sample.

Market	Best public figure	Basis	Confidence
Czechia	Direct 50.2%, OTA 35.7%; Booking Holdings 76.4%, Expedia Group 8.1% of OTA	HOTREC 2024, reference year 2023, n=72 and 5513	Medium
Poland	OTA 37.5%, direct offline 39.0%, direct online 15.6%	EC market study, Jan-May 2021, 51 independents that use OTAs14	Low
UK	Direct 46.4%, OTA 37.9%; Booking Holdings 67.1%, Expedia Group 19.2% of OTA	HOTREC 2018, reference year 2017, n=20 and 1715	Low
Turkey	Direct 55.1%, OTA 20.7%; Booking Holdings 59.8%, Expedia Group 30.3% of OTA	HOTREC 2024, 2023, n=32 and 29, domestic guests not separated13	Low
Ukraine	No national statistic; the GM of Khortitsa Palace in Zaporizhzhia said Booking.com gave 7-8% of bookings	Interfax-Ukraine, 202316	Very low
Portugal	OTA booking rate 79.7%	Cloudbeds customers, not comparable with HOTREC17	Low
Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Lithuania	No public data	none	none

Phocuswright's model puts UK supplier-direct online near 35% and OTAs near 32% in 2025¹⁸. That counts online gross bookings, not overnights, so it cannot sit in the HOTREC column. Croatia: the resort group Valamar said in July 2026 that about 65% of its sales come direct from individual guests and Booking.com accounts for about 10% of revenue¹⁹. One chain's announcement, so no country row.

Common failure modes

I did not capture live Booking or Expedia pages for this block (2026-10-11): the partner hubs are gated, and Google Hotels thins results for automated browsers. The contrast is a table pair instead. Page 16, above, is what the average hides. Page 93, below, is what the platform split hides.

Failure 1: quoting one study with two denominators

What's wrong: In September 2026 Booking.com's public-affairs director wrote that "Over 56% of all bookings in 2025 were made directly with hotels" and that no single online travel agency accounts for more than 20% of all bookings²⁰. A trade commentator replied that Booking.com alone holds about 19.8%²¹. Both are arithmetic on HOTREC. The 56% is the unweighted column (56.4%), while the weighted headline is 51.3%². His line holds for the Booking.com brand (19.8%), which is how most readers will hear "a single OTA". A group reading breaks it: Booking Holdings is 68.8% of 29.9%, about 20.6%, on my mixed-base arithmetic.

How it hurts: An owner who reads one side relaxes, and one who reads the other panics. My position: the weighted figure is the default, and any unweighted one must say so. A party with a stake picking the kinder column is a cue to check the denominator.

Failure 2: "66% of online hotel bookings"

What's wrong: Travel Extra's headline gave Booking.com 66% "of online hotel bookings"²². HOTREC's 66.1% is Booking.com's share of OTA bookings. On overnights it is roughly a fifth.

How it hurts: Ask "66% of what?" first.

Failure 3: borrowing a number from another universe

What's wrong: Cloudbeds names Portugal (79.7%) and Spain (76.7%) as its highest OTA-dependence markets¹⁷. HOTREC's Spain is 35.2%. Both can be true: Cloudbeds measures small independents on its platform, HOTREC all overnights including phone and walk-in.

How it hurts: A Spanish owner at 50% OTA reads "26.7 points below average" against Cloudbeds' 76.7% or "14.8 points above" against HOTREC's 35.2%, depending on which report arrived first.

Failure 4: reading a mixed-guest sample as a domestic market

What's wrong: Turkey's 20.7% OTA share is a 32-hotel sample that does not separate domestic from foreign guests¹³. Booking.com has been blocked from domestic bookings since 2017, and Hurriyet Daily News reported on 31 July 2026 that the ban still stood while a regulation to lift it was being prepared²³.

How it hurts: A hotel selling to Turkish guests cannot use that row, and no domestic split is published. The honest cell is "no public data".

Step-by-step fix: benchmark your hotel's booking channels against HOTREC's European data

1. Export nights by source. Pull 12 months by source from your PMS or channel manager, net of cancellations. In Cloudbeds, SiteMinder or Mews this is the source/channel production report; check that metasearch bookings (free booking links, and paid Google Hotel Ads clicks that land on your own engine) land as direct. HOTREC counts overnights, so use guest nights if your PMS reports them and room nights otherwise, never bookings.
2. Group sources like HOTREC. Direct is website, phone, email and walk-in together, and a website-only count will read far below 51.3%. The other lines are OTA, tour operator and travel agency, and GDS.
3. Find your row. Use the country table above or the fallback table, then add your segment rows (room count, city size, setting)⁵. Write down a range, not one number. Seasonal hotel? Compare full year to full year, since year-round hotels run 31.8% OTA against 25.7% for summer-season ones⁵.
4. Discount small-sample gaps. With n under 50 (Spain, Finland, Slovakia, Netherlands), a 5-point gap is noise. That is my rule of thumb, not HOTREC's.
5. Split OTA volume by platform. Take the Booking and Expedia extranet totals and compare them with the platform columns above.
6. Pick priorities. Use the country list below.
7. Check commission terms. Read the contract. Booking says the exact percentage "depends on your country, property type, and the accommodation agreement you signed", and publishes no rate by country²⁴. Expedia says compensation "varies around the globe"²⁵. Booking does not charge commission on city tax, so confirm yours is entered as a tax and not a fee. (My inference.) Compare net-of-commission revenue by channel too.
8. Turn on Google free booking links. It is a Hotel Center setting, and Google says "There's no cost for clicks on free booking links."²⁶

Priorities by country for hotel booking channels in Europe

• Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Slovakia are Booking-led, with Booking.com at 65-73% of OTA bookings and Expedia Group at 8-15%. Spend extranet time on Booking and on direct (55-64% there, see direct bookings without breaking parity). In Germany, HRS group is the one local OTA with a measurable share, 9.9% of OTA bookings, mostly business-travel demand³.
• Sweden, France and Spain have a real second OTA, with Expedia Group at 24-34% of OTA bookings (Ireland reads 25.6% on n=35, indicative only). Keep both matched. One Expedia contract covers Hotels.com too (see OTA channel tiers), so a missing Hotels.com is a mapping check²⁵.
• Hungary (39.8%) and Spain (35.2%, n=49) are the most OTA-dependent; the Netherlands reads 43.0% on 25 hotels, indicative only. Look first at direct conversion and metasearch.
• Greece is a contract market: tour operators carry a quarter of overnights.
• Poland and Czechia look Booking-first. Expedia Group is 8.1% of Czech OTA bookings¹³, and in our Polish properties 3.9% of reviews⁴. In the EC study, 43% of surveyed Polish hotels use Expedia Group against 90% for Booking Holdings¹⁴.
• Turkey, Ukraine, the UK and the unlisted markets: use your own export, and import nothing.

Soft recommendations

• Ask your channel manager for source mix by guest country as well as hotel country. A Polish hotel full of German guests sits between rows.
• Where an extranet gives no shares, review mix is a rough stand-in: our Polish properties show 1,876 Google reviews against 8,036 on Booking.com in 12 months⁴. A proxy, never a share.

Self-audit checklist

Run this on your own hotel without our product:

• I have 12 months of guest nights (or room nights) by source, net of cancellations.
• I grouped phone, email, walk-in and website as direct, like HOTREC.
• I compared against my country row and at least one segment row, and wrote a range.
• I checked each cell's sample size and ignored gaps smaller than it supports.
• I know my Booking:Expedia split and compared it with the platform columns.
• I have read my commission terms, including how city tax is entered.

How OTALift surfaces this

Our rate-parity report now reads your country: its volume estimate scales your review counts into stays with your row from OTA share of hotel bookings by country. Poland uses HOTREC's 2017 row, marked Low. A country with no row, Ukraine included, takes the pooled Rest of Europe row (Low, no Booking split), so Google reviews size the total.

The Distribution Width check has not changed. It compares the OTAs seen on the Google Hotels price panel with one list of seven names (Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, Hotels.com, Priceline, Trip.com, Airbnb) for every country. "Missing" means not seen on that panel on those dates, and our Polish review data (Expedia 3.9% of reviews) suggests the list overweights Expedia there. A stacked Genius and mobile-rate spread on a small property can still be demoted to PASS when its monthly figure falls under about three days of at-risk bookings at your ADR. If the card says Hotels.com is missing, read Expedia's FAQ first, since one contract covers its brands²⁵.

Related articles

• OTA channel tiers: why you don't "list on" half the channels selling your rooms
• Direct bookings without breaking parity
• Rate parity fundamentals
• Pillar: How OTA ranking algorithms actually work

Frequently asked questions

What share of European hotel bookings goes through OTAs?

29.9% of overnights in 2025 (weighted, excluding chains). Direct was 51.3%. With ten chains included, OTAs are 28.2%¹⁸.

Which country in Europe has the highest direct booking share?

Italy, at 64.0% of overnights (n=539). Finland is 62.7% on only 41 hotels².

Is Booking.com or Expedia bigger in Europe?

Booking.com, by a wide margin: 66.1% of OTA bookings against 16.6% for Expedia Group in HOTREC's unweighted sample. Among countries with 35 or more hotels in the sample, Expedia Group is strongest in Sweden (33.6%)³.

Does HOTREC publish data for Poland, the UK or Turkey?

Not in 2026. They have no column of their own. The only place they could appear is the pooled "Rest of Europe" column of 157 hotels, and HOTREC does not list its members. The fallback table above gives older figures with year and sample size².

Sources and methodology

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Footnotes

1. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, pp. 4-5 and 16. "In 2025, direct channels generated 51.3% of overnights* in the overall sample"; weighted by Eurostat overnights, without chain data. The 2013 comparison (direct 57.6%, OTA 19.7%) is from the executive-summary table on p. 4. https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, p. 16, "Market shares of distribution channels in Europe 2025: weighted values (without aggregated data from chains)". Country shares, number of observations, Eurostat weights, the "Rest Europe" column (n=157) and the unweighted column (direct 56.4%, OTA 27.8%). The 27.4-point spread and the 59.6% weight sum are my arithmetic. https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - page image read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

3. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, p. 93, "Unweighted relative market shares (in %) of major OTAs for selected countries in 2025" (European sample n=1,591). The p. 94-95 bar charts print different Expedia Group values for several countries; the table values are used here. https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - page image and text layer read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. OTALift internal data, review-intake aggregates (Booking.com, Expedia, Google) across 14 Polish properties (Booking.com 8,036, Expedia 327, Google 1,876 reviews), trailing 12 months to 2026-10-11. Only 8 of the 14 have an Expedia listing linked in our system; unlinked listings contribute zero, so 3.9% understates Expedia. Non-random pipeline sample of 63 properties, read-only query; illustration only, below the 500-property bar for a market claim. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, p. 89 (OTA share by segment, read from the page image) and pp. 84 and 97-98 (independent hotel, chain and cooperation cuts). Independent 30.8% OTA, chain 31.5%; Booking.com 69.4% vs 56.3% of OTA bookings; Expedia.com 12.0% vs 23.6%; city above 250,000 people 42.2%, alpine 22.4%, 20-50 rooms 27.7%, year-round 31.8% vs summer-season 25.7%. https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, pp. 3-5 and 11: 2,713 hotels, of which 1,882 individual hotel responses from 28 countries plus aggregated data from 831 chain properties; "Results weighted using Eurostat overnight stay data to reflect the relative size of national hotel markets." https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩²

7. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, p. 87, OTA share by country 2013-2025 (Hungary 19.1 to 39.8, France 24.8 to 25.5) and the study text "No common European trajectory is observed." https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf ↩ ↩²

8. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, pp. 20-21, results with aggregated chain data (10 chains, 831 hotels, 128,154 rooms): direct 49.7%, OTA 28.2%; Spain OTA 24.7% against 35.2% without chains. https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - text layer read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. HOTREC / HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Roland Schegg), "European Hotel Distribution Study 2026" (reference year 2025), September 2026, p. 82, direct share by country 2013-2025 (Greece 54.9% to 40.3%; Italy 64.1% in the trend table against 64.0% on p. 16). https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2026_2026_35/full-study_european-hotel-distribution-study-2026_hotrec.pdf - page image read 2026-10-11. ↩ ↩²

10. European Commission, DMA factsheet, "How the DMA ensures businesses using Booking.com are free to set their prices on and off Booking.com", 28 September 2026. "Booking.com has removed these requirements from its General Delivery Terms (GDTs), agreements and partner programmes."; "Full removal of contractual parity requirements in July 2024". https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/factsheet-how-dma-ensures-businesses-using-bookingcom-are-free-set-their-prices-and-bookingcom-2026-09-28_en - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

11. Court of Justice of the European Union, Press Release No 145/24, Case C-264/23, Booking.com and Booking.com (Deutschland), 19 September 2024. "it has not been established that price parity clauses, whether wide or narrow, first, are objectively necessary" and "proportionate". https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/2024-09/cp240145en.pdf - press release read; full judgment not opened. ↩

12. CNMC (Spain), "The CNMC fines Booking.com EUR 413.24 million for abusing its dominant position during the last 5 years", Madrid, 30 July 2024 (case S/0005/21). The fine was suspended by the Audiencia Nacional pending appeal as of March 2025 (Hosteltur, 7 March 2025, https://www.hosteltur.com/168767_la-audiencia-nacional-paraliza-la-multa-millonaria-de-la-cnmc-a-booking.html). https://www.cnmc.es/sites/default/files/editor_contenidos/Notas%20de%20prensa/2024/20240730_NP_%20Sancionador_Booking.com_eng.pdf - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

13. HOTREC, "European Hotel Distribution Study 2024" (reference year 2023): Czech Republic pp. 62-63 and 105 (direct 50.2%, OTA 35.7%, n=72; Booking Holdings 76.4%, Expedia Group 8.1%, n=55); Turkey pp. 92, 99 and 105 (direct 55.1%, OTA 20.7%, n=32; Booking Holdings 59.8%, Expedia Group 30.3%, n=29). https://www.hotrec.eu/media/static/files/import/all_news_2024_2024_21/hotrec-distribution-study-2024.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

14. European Commission DG COMP, "Market study on the distribution of hotel accommodation in the EU", final report COMP/2020/OP/002, January 2023, Tables 13 and 19. Poland: OTA 37.5%, direct offline 39.0%, direct online 15.6% (Jan-May 2021, 51 independents that use OTAs); hotels using Booking Holdings 90%, Expedia Group 43%, HRS 53%. A usage rate, not a sales share. https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-01/kd0722783enn_hotel_accomodation_market_study.pdf ↩ ↩²

15. HOTREC, "European Hotel Distribution Study 2018" (reference year 2017): United Kingdom pp. 67-68 and 82-84 (direct 46.4%, OTA 37.9%, n=20; Booking Holdings 67.06%, Expedia Group 19.18%, n=17). Mirror: https://www.turob.com/assets/Duyurular-Dosyalari-image/2018/Final-full-internal-use-only-version-European-Hotel-Distribution-study.pdf ↩

16. Interfax-Ukraine, 21 July 2023, interview with the general manager of Khortitsa Palace, Zaporizhzhia. "Booking.com - важливий інструмент, він давав 7-8% бронювань, переважно на вікенд" (Booking.com is an important tool, it gave 7-8% of bookings, mostly on weekends). https://interfax.com.ua/news/economic/924244.html - accessed 2026-10-11. One hotel, 2022-2023, front-line region. ↩

17. Cloudbeds, "Hospitality industry report", OTA booking rate. Portugal 79.7% and Spain 76.7% named as where OTA dependence is highest; global 63.4% of independent-hotel bookings. https://www.cloudbeds.com/hospitality-industry-report/ - accessed 2026-10-11. Vendor customer base, not comparable with HOTREC. ↩ ↩²

18. Phocuswright, "UK travel distribution has found its equilibrium. Will it stay that way?", UK Travel Market Essentials research update, May 2026. "In 2025, supplier-direct online and OTA channels held near-equal positions in U.K. hotel distribution, at roughly 35% and 32% respectively." https://www.phocuswright.com/Travel-Research/Research-Updates/2026/UK-travel-distribution-has-found-its-equilibrium-Will-it-stay-that-way - page blocked to automated fetch; read in a browser by the research lane, 2026-10-11. ↩

19. Lider (English edition), 22 July 2026, on Valamar Riviera: "about 65 percent coming from direct sales to individual guests" and "bookings made through Booking.com account for only about 10 percent of revenue". https://en.lider.media/2026/07/22/valamar-offers-small-hotels-the-opportunity-to-bypass-booking-com/ - accessed 2026-10-11. Company announcement. ↩

20. Peter Lochbihler (Booking.com), "Hotel Distribution Is Not a Zero-Sum Game," Hospitality Net, 22 September 2026. https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4134496/hotel-distribution-is-not-a-zero-sum-game - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

21. Markus Busch, "Booking.com says Europe's hotels don't depend on it," Hospitality Net, September 2026. The 19.8% is his multiplication of 66.1% by 29.9%. https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4134781/bookingcom-says-europes-hotels-dont-depend-on-it - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

22. Travel Extra (Ireland), 21 September 2026, "Booking.com has 66pc market share & Expedia 17pc of online hotel bookings - HOTREC". https://www.travelextra.ie/booking-com-has-66pc-market-share-of-hotel-bookings/ - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

23. Hurriyet Daily News, 31 July 2026, "Booking.com set for return after 9 years". https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/booking-com-set-for-return-after-9-years-225021 - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

24. Booking.com Partner Hub, "Understanding your commission". "The exact percentage depends on your country, property type, and the accommodation agreement you signed when you joined us."; "We don't charge commission on local taxes, such as city tax." https://partner.booking.com/en-us/help/commission-invoices-tax/invoices/understanding-your-commission - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩

25. Expedia Partner Central, hotels FAQ. "You do not need to sign up for all Expedia Group brands separately. When you partner with us, your listing will appear on ... Expedia, Hotels.com, and more"; "Compensation for reservations varies around the globe". https://partner.expediagroup.com/en-us/industries/hotels - accessed 2026-10-11. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20261012054620/https://partner.expediagroup.com/en-us/industries/hotels ↩ ↩² ↩³

26. Google Hotel Center Help, "About free booking links". "There's no cost for clicks on free booking links." https://support.google.com/hotelprices/answer/10472393?hl=en - accessed 2026-10-11. ↩