Half of Europe's hotels say an OTA sells their rooms below the rate they set — and their own reservations teams now quote against that lower price. That is the core finding of HOTREC's distribution study, published September 15 and based on responses from 1,882 hotels: 51% reported an OTA undercutting their own rate often or occasionally, up from four in ten two years ago. Eight in ten of those hotels said they never agreed to the discounts.

The mechanism is the payment contract. Through Payments by Booking.com, the merchant model run by Booking.com's parent, Booking Holdings, the platform collects the guest's money and later remits the hotel its loaded rate minus commission and a payment fee. What the guest actually pays is Booking.com's decision. A revenue manager loads $200; the hotel website shows $200; Booking.com shows $180, covering the gap itself under what it calls Booking Sponsored Benefit. The company tells hotels plainly that "your rates appear lower on our platform than the rate you set."

The parity machine, reversed

For two decades rate parity clauses worked in the opposite direction: hotels could not undercut the OTA on their own sites. National bans began dismantling those clauses in 2015, and since late 2024 the EU's Digital Markets Act bars Booking.com from using them at all. On paper, European hotels have never had more pricing freedom. In practice, 65% of hotels in the HOTREC study use Booking.com's payment service — the contract that permits Booking.com to sell below the loaded rate.

The practical consequence plays out daily. A guest emails the hotel directly; before the reservations agent quotes, she opens Booking.com on a second screen, because the guest has likely already seen that price. Booking.com alone accounts for 66.1% of OTA bookings among surveyed hotels.

Radisson has institutionalized the workaround. In July it made its best-rate guarantee automatic across more than 1,600 hotels, with a system scanning Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda and five other sites and dropping the direct rate to match any lower price found. The booking then stays on Radisson's website, commission-free — but at 1,600 hotels, the direct rate now tracks the cheapest OTA. Independent hotels do the same work by hand, through rate-shopping tools and morning checks before revenue meetings.

The price travels beyond the platform

Booking Holdings resells the same rooms to banks, airlines and loyalty programs, which sell them in their own apps and rewards sites. Skift names Citi, American Airlines, Southwest and U.S. Bank among the buyers, and reported in August that the group is consolidating all of it onto one system run by its Agoda team. Revolut sells Booking.com rooms with its own reward points layered on top, and the group is pushing its Kayak brand into business travel.

Those buyers can move the price again. The system offers them "pricing and margin controls" — their own markup per member tier, visible only to logged-in users. Hotel rate-shopping tools read public pages and never see these prices. When HOTREC asked whether OTAs pass hotel rates to other platforms, 44% of hotels said yes and 26% said they didn't know.

Payments share climbing

Booking Holdings' annual report puts 70% of everything booked across the group in 2025 through its payments business, up from 63% a year earlier, driven by bookings moving from hotel-collect to Booking.com's own payments. By early 2026 the share had reached 72%.

The contract also shifts cash flow. A hotel paid by bank transfer receives its payout only after the guest checks out — an August stay paid for in March reaches the hotel in August at the earliest. And Booking.com's Genius program gives members a discount plus, at enrolled hotels, free breakfast or an upgrade, all funded by the hotel, further eroding the case for booking direct.

Chains can manage the leverage. They negotiate for thousands of hotels at once and split volume — Expedia brings a third of OTA bookings at the chain hotels in HOTREC's study, versus seven in ten going to Booking.com alone at independents. For an independent, Booking.com sells roughly one in five room nights, and its price sets the bar for the other four. As the payments share keeps climbing, hotels that load a rate every morning will keep ceding the guest-facing price to the platform — unless Brussels acts on HOTREC's lobbying.