European hotels are directing a growing share of their intermediary business through two platform groups, with a new HOTREC study estimating that Booking Holdings and Expedia Group together account for 85.4% of hotel bookings made through online travel agencies.

Booking Holdings accounts for 68.8% of the OTA segment, according to the European Hotel Distribution Study 2026, while Booking.com alone represents 66.1%. The figures describe concentration within online travel agencies rather than the whole hotel market: direct bookings remain the largest overall route, representing 51.3% of room bookings, while OTAs account for 29.9%.

The study covers the 2025 reference year and draws on information from 2,713 hotels across 28 countries, combining individual responses with aggregated information from hotel chains. It was conducted by Professor Roland Schegg of HES-SO Valais-Wallis with HOTREC and national hotel associations.

Because HOTREC represents the European hospitality industry, its regulatory conclusions reflect hotel interests rather than a neutral competition-authority assessment. The distribution figures nevertheless illustrate how digital-platform concentration affects the commercial terms under which thousands of European businesses sell their core product.

Direct sales coexist with platform dependence

The data shows why concentration and overall distribution share need to be separated. Hotels still generate slightly more than half their bookings directly, but the importance of OTAs has grown over the longer term, from 19.7% of bookings in 2013 to 29.9% in 2025. Direct channels lost six percentage points over the same period.

Hotels are therefore managing two competing commercial priorities. Their own websites, telephone sales, and other direct channels provide greater control over the customer relationship and economics, while large travel platforms provide discovery, international reach, comparison, payments, and demand that an independent property may struggle to reproduce.

Platform scale becomes particularly influential when most intermediary demand passes through very few companies. A hotel dissatisfied with the contractual or commercial terms on one major service cannot necessarily shift equivalent volume to a long list of rivals because travellers are also concentrated on the platforms with the widest inventory and strongest recognition.

HOTREC’s survey reports other sources of friction alongside market share. Some 51% of hotels said OTAs undercut their prices frequently or occasionally, compared with 43% in 2023, while 80% of respondents affected by undercutting said they had not agreed to the lower price. Separately, 44% reported multi-sourcing, where rates or inventory can move through other intermediaries.

Those findings are based on hotel reports rather than an independent audit of individual transactions, but they show why control over distribution extends beyond commission percentages. Pricing, availability, customer information, inventory, billing, and the ability to move a guest towards a direct relationship all become part of the dependency.

The DMA reaches hotel distribution

Booking.com already falls within Europe’s gatekeeper regime under the Digital Markets Act, which applies obligations intended to make large digital markets more contestable.

Among those obligations, hotels and other business users must be free to offer better prices or conditions through other channels, including their own websites, while the platform also faces requirements around access to data generated through the service.

HOTREC is using its latest study to argue for firm enforcement of those obligations and for retention of protections under the Platform-to-Business Regulation. Those are advocacy positions rather than findings produced by the market-share data itself.

For hotels, regulation remains only one part of the commercial response. Direct-booking technology, channel managers, metasearch connectivity, customer-relationship systems, payment tools, and pricing software all influence whether a property can reduce dependency without sacrificing occupancy or international reach.

The study shows considerable digital adoption already: 66% reported using channel-management software, while 58% were connected to metasearch and 83% of relevant connected users used Google Hotel Ads. Artificial intelligence remains less widespread, with 26% of hotels in the study reporting AI use.

Technology can strengthen a hotel’s ability to manage more distribution channels, although it can also add another layer of suppliers between the property and the customer. A smaller hotel trying to reduce exposure to one dominant OTA may still become dependent on software vendors, advertising platforms, payment processors, or metasearch services that mediate different parts of the booking journey.

The longer-term trend in HOTREC’s series is nevertheless clear within its sample: OTAs have taken a larger share of distribution since 2013, while the OTA segment itself has become highly concentrated. Direct bookings remain the largest channel, so Europe’s hotel market is not simply controlled by two platforms, but the part of the market where hotels rely on online intermediaries offers increasingly limited large-scale alternatives.

That concentration gives DMA enforcement a practical business test far removed from app stores or social networks. Hotels will ultimately judge the regime by whether it leaves them with greater room to change supplier, pricing, and customer-acquisition strategies without sacrificing access to demand.