Booking Holdings controls 68.8% of European online travel agency bookings — roughly 20.6% of all hotel room nights sold on the continent — yet a Booking.com executive argued on September 22 that no European hotel depends on a single platform.

Peter Lochbihler, Booking.com's global head of public affairs, published an article claiming hotel distribution in Europe is balanced and competitive, and that "no one could convincingly argue that hotels depend on a single online platform." His evidence: the 2026 European Hotel Distribution Study from HOTREC, the European hotel association, and its finding that no single OTA takes more than 20% of all bookings.

The arithmetic sits one fifth of a percentage point under that line — by brand. Count the parent company and it crosses.

What do the HOTREC numbers actually show?

OTAs accounted for 29.9% of European hotel bookings in 2025. Booking.com alone captured 66.1% of that OTA volume, which works out to about 19.8% of all hotel bookings in Europe — just under the 20% threshold Lochbihler cited.

Add Agoda and Priceline, both owned by Booking Holdings, and the group's OTA share rises to 68.8%, or about 20.6% of every hotel room booked in Europe.

The article also leans on a "over 56%" direct-booking figure. That number comes from a chart credited to Statista, not the study itself. HOTREC's headline figure for direct bookings is 51.3%.

The op-ed omits the study's rate findings entirely: 51% of hotels report OTAs selling their rooms below the price the hotel set, and 80% of those hotels never agreed to it.

What did the EU court decide?

Thirteen days before the article ran, on September 9, the EU General Court dismissed Booking's challenge to the European Commission's 2023 ban on its acquisition of Etraveli, the flight seller. In that ruling, the court upheld the Commission's finding that Booking holds a dominant position in Europe's online hotel room sales market, with a share close to 70%.

Booking said on the day of the ruling that it was weighing a final appeal.

The court and the executive's article describe the same market, thirteen days apart, with materially different conclusions.

Why the 20% average hides your hotel's exposure

The 20% figure is a European average, and it looks low mainly because OTAs deliver less than a third of bookings across the study. Booking's grip on the OTA slice barely moves by hotel type:

• 68.8% of OTA bookings across Europe
• 69.4% of OTA bookings at independent hotels
• 56.3% at chain hotels, where Expedia takes roughly a third — but the ten chain groups in the sample carry too little weight to shift the European figure

What actually determines Booking's share of a given hotel is how much of that hotel's business runs through OTAs. If 40% of a property's room nights come through OTAs and the split looks like the average independent's, Booking accounts for about 28% of everything it sells. At 60% OTA dependency, Booking passes 40%.

What does each side want?

HOTREC released the study while pressing the Commission to enforce the Digital Markets Act and to preserve rules requiring platforms to explain ranking criteria and give notice before changing contract terms — rules the Commission has proposed repealing.

The individual-hotel figures are survey responses from 1,882 properties; the chain figures come from ten groups' internal data.

How to calculate your own number

Operators can measure their real exposure directly: total the room nights across twelve months of Booking.com statements, plus Agoda's if applicable, and divide by total room nights for the same period.

That figure — not a Brussels average — is what matters when a contract change, a rate parity dispute or a ranking drop lands on a general manager's desk. With the Commission proposing to repeal ranking-transparency rules and Booking considering a further appeal, hotels should expect the distribution fight to continue into 2026.