Direct bookings vs OTAs: how much Booking and Expedia really cost your Tenerife hotel

If you run a boutique hotel in Costa Adeje, a holiday apartment in Los Cristianos or a rural hotel in La Orotava, there's a number that probably stings every month: the commission OTAs are taking.

This article sticks to numbers and steps: what the platforms themselves say they charge, how to work out what you pay, what your website needs so guests actually book on it, and what you can do without fighting the OTAs. If you're after how I build a hotel website, that's on the hotel web design in Tenerife page.

How much commission do Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb charge in 2026?

None of the big platforms publishes a single rate that applies to every property. Here's what they say themselves:

• Booking.com — charges a set percentage of the total booking amount, and that percentage depends on your country, property type and the agreement you signed. If you join programmes like Preferred Partner or Visibility Booster, an extra percentage goes on top; for the Preferred Partner Programme Booking only says it costs "a small increase in commission", without giving the figure
• Expedia (incl. Hotels.com, Vrbo) — depends on your contract. There's no public rate I can link you to, so the reliable number is the one on your statement
• Airbnb — on the single fee, most hosts pay 15.5%; on the split fee, hosts generally pay 3% and the guest pays their own service fee on top

A worked example with round numbers: at an average rate of €95 a night and an 18% commission, that's around €17 per night that doesn't hit your bank account. For a 25-room hotel selling 280 nights per room a year, 80% of them through OTAs, that comes to around €95,000 a year in commissions.

That 18% is an assumption for the example, not a published rate. Your real percentage is in your contract and on your commission invoices, and it's the only one that matters.

Want your exact number? Run your own figures through the OTA commission calculator (in Spanish) — 30 seconds, no email or signup.

How do you work out what you really pay in commission?

The calculator gives you an estimate. If you want the exact figure for your business, do this with last year's paperwork:

1. Download the last 12 months of commission invoices from each platform. Booking sends one invoice a month covering the stays that ended the month before.
2. Add up what you actually paid, not the percentage in your contract. If you're in a visibility programme, the percentage on your statements will be higher than the one in your contract.
3. Pull from your PMS how many nights you sold through each channel: each OTA, your website, phone, email and walk-ins.
4. Work out your direct share: direct nights divided by total nights.
5. Work out what each OTA booking costs you: total commission divided by the number of OTA bookings. That's your ceiling: the most it makes sense to spend to win that same booking through your own site.
6. Redo the sum every month and compare it with the same month last year. In a destination as seasonal as Tenerife, comparing July with February tells you nothing.

Two Booking details worth knowing. Commission is charged on the total booking amount, including extra charges like cleaning. And cancellations and no-shows have to be marked in the extranet within 48 hours of the check-out date: if you don't, Booking charges full commission on the original booking.

Example: a small property

A worked example with round numbers, made up to show the maths: 6 apartments, an average rate of €90 a night and 70% occupancy over the year. That's about 1,530 nights sold and about €138,000 in revenue. If 85% comes through OTAs and the average commission is 16% (another assumption), you pay about €18,800 a year in commissions.

Now imagine you go from 15% to 30% direct bookings, the benchmark the calculator uses. OTAs drop to 70% of revenue and commission falls to about €15,500: about €3,300 less a year. From that you subtract what the direct channel costs you: if you give a 5% discount on those direct bookings, that's about €1,000; plus whatever you pay for the booking engine and the payment gateway. Ask your providers for exact prices before you run the numbers.

This table puts the two situations in the example side by side, with the same rounded figures:

The honest sum isn't "I save the whole commission". It's "I save the commission minus what it costs me to sell direct". In the example you're left with about €2,300 before paying for the engine and the gateway: if they cost you less than that, you come out ahead. Run it with your own figures.

The direct guest is worth more

It's not just the commission. A guest who books direct on your site:

• Hands you their email — you can market to them legally, announce your low-season offers, win repeat stays
• Can buy your extras straight from you — breakfast, parking, late check-out, airport transfer, with no platform in between
• Books on your terms — cancellation, deposit and no-shows under your policy, not the platform's
• Reviews you directly — the review lands on Google, not on the platform

Why your current website doesn't convert

The guest opens Booking, finds your hotel, checks your website — and realises booking on your site is slower, more complex, or doesn't even show real-time pricing. They go back to Booking, and that booking pays commission again.

Hotel websites that actually convert share three traits:

1. Booking engine above the fold — dates and price visible before any scroll
2. Same availability and rate as Booking (or better — a "direct best price" guarantee)
3. Instant confirmation — no "I'll get back to you in 24h", no long forms

What your booking engine has to do

Before you sign up for one, or if you already have one and nobody books through your site, go through this list:

• Connected to your channel manager or PMS, so there's one source of availability and you never sell the same room twice.
• Inside your website, on your domain, not a separate page with a different look that makes guests wonder if they're still in the right place.
• Built for phones: few screens, big buttons, and card payment without having to create an account.
• A clear total price before the last step, with no surprises at the end.
• Cancellation policy visible before payment, written in one sentence people understand.
• In your guests' languages, like the rest of the site. I explain this in multilingual websites for tourism in the Canaries.
• Instant confirmation email, with the address, directions and a phone or WhatsApp contact.
• Tracking: you need to see how many bookings come through the site each month. If you don't measure it, you won't know whether anything you do works.

One extra worth checking: Google's free booking links. With them your site can show up with its rate when someone searches for hotels on Google, and there's no cost for clicks on those links. If your booking engine or channel manager already works with Google, you may already be connected through your provider: ask them whether they can switch the links on.

Can you set a different price on your website?

In the European Union, the rules for the biggest platforms have changed. The European Commission designated Booking as a gatekeeper on 13 May 2024 for its Booking.com service, under the Digital Markets Act. That law requires gatekeepers to allow businesses to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the platform.

In practice, your website can have its own offer. Before changing prices, read the current version of your contract and your extranet terms, and if anything's unclear, ask Booking in writing. With Expedia and the rest, check what you signed too.

And if you'd rather not touch the price, give the direct guest something the OTA doesn't:

• Breakfast included or a welcome drink.
• Late check-out or early check-in, subject to availability.
• Free parking.
• More flexible cancellation than on the platform.
• A discounted airport transfer.

How do you get more direct bookings without leaving the OTAs?

The mistake is thinking it's either/or. The reality: use Booking for new visibility, capture direct from guests who already know you. Three tactics to win back the direct guest:

• In-room card with a QR to your site offering 5% off the next stay if booked direct
• Post-stay email with a 10% code valid for 6 months
• Optimised Google Business profile with a "Book" button pointing to YOUR site, not Booking

How big is the direct channel today? HOTREC's European Hotel Distribution Study (2026 edition, 2025 data) puts Spain at 36.6% of overnights through direct channels and 35.2% through OTAs, from a small sample of 49 Spanish hotels. And only 14.0% of the total came through real-time booking on the hotel's own website; the rest of the direct share came by phone, email, contact forms or walk-ins. That gap is what you can work on. It is not magic — it is a fast site, a booking engine on your own domain, and a post-stay email. Without touching the price.

The same study has another finding worth keeping an eye on: more than half of the European hotels surveyed say an OTA has undercut their rates at least occasionally, and most of those affected say it happened without their consent. Check now and then how your hotel shows up on the OTAs and on Google, because if a guest sees a lower price elsewhere, your site loses the booking.

The post-stay email, within the law

The post-stay email is one of the cheapest tactics you have, but in Spain it comes with rules. The Spanish e-commerce law bans sending advertising by email to people who haven't asked for it, with one exception: where there's a prior contractual relationship, you can write to a customer whose details you obtained lawfully about your own products or services similar to what they already bought, as long as every email offers them a simple, free way to opt out (article 21 of the LSSI, in Spanish).

That fits guests who booked direct with you. For guests who came through an OTA, check first what data the platform passes on and what you're allowed to use it for. If in doubt, have your adviser look at it. A good post-stay email includes:

• A short, personal thank-you, signed by someone at the hotel.
• The direct link to leave a review on your Google profile.
• The code for the next stay and how long it's valid.
• A link to your website, not to the platform.
• A visible unsubscribe link.

Common mistakes

• Your Google profile's "Book" button pointing to an OTA. That's a search by someone who already knows your name: send them to your site.
• A higher price on your site than on Booking because you forgot to update it. If the guest compares, they'll see it.
• A booking engine that's slow or breaks on phones. I explain why in why every second of load time costs bookings.
• "Request availability" instead of instant confirmation.
• Not measuring what share of your nights is direct, so you never know if anything is improving.
• Cutting the OTAs off overnight before your direct channel is working.
• Forgetting to mark no-shows and cancellations in the extranet in time and paying commission on nights you never sold.

Conclusion

OTAs are a visibility tool, not your main sales channel. Every Booking reservation you could have captured on your own site is commission you could have kept.

For a hotel, a website with its own booking engine is a custom project: I scope it around your PMS and channel manager. If you want to see how, let's talk, no commitment.

If your property is small and a clear website leading to your current booking engine is enough, one of my plans might do the job: they're all on the offer page. I'll tell you which one fits as soon as you get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to leave Booking to get direct bookings?

No. Booking brings you guests who don't know you yet; your website is there so the ones who already know you book with you. Pulling out overnight from a platform that fills a big chunk of your occupancy is a risk you don't need to take.

How long until I see a difference?

There's no timeframe I can honestly promise. It depends on how many guests come back, the state of your Google profile and how easy it is to book on your site. What you can do is measure it: note your share of direct nights every month and compare it with the same month last year.

Can I charge less on my website than on Booking?

Since Booking's designation as a gatekeeper in the EU, the law requires it to let businesses promote their offer outside the platform. Even so, read your current contract before changing prices, and remember you can also compete with extras instead of discounts.

Is a form or WhatsApp enough instead of a booking engine?

For a hotel, what converts is seeing price and availability and getting instant confirmation. In HOTREC's Spanish sample, real-time booking on the hotel's own site already outweighs the contact form without availability check (14.0% of overnights versus 4.3%). For one or two apartments with returning guests, WhatsApp can be enough at the start if you reply quickly.