Online Travel Distribution 2026: What OTAs Take per Booking, What They Spend to Win It, and Where a Startup Fits

Almost every travel startup pitch touches distribution somewhere. A booking engine for small hotels, a channel manager, a niche marketplace for one kind of trip, a B2B API for agencies, a tool that wins back direct bookings. All of them take a position on the same question: who owns the guest, and what does it cost to get them?

The large online travel agencies (OTAs) answer it in their filings every quarter. This article reads those numbers: what the OTAs keep from a booking, what they spend to win it, how suppliers route around them, and where there is room for a new entrant.

The scale you are competing next to

In the second quarter of 2026, Booking Holdings processed $50,957 million in gross bookings, Expedia Group $33,928 million and Airbnb $27,247 million (company filings, Q2 2026). Booking reserved 325 million room nights in that quarter and Airbnb 148 million nights and seats.

The supply side is just as concentrated. Globally, Booking.com listed 4.4 million properties at the end of 2025, of which about 500,000 were hotels, motels and resorts and 3.9 million were homes, apartments and other alternative stays (Booking Holdings annual report, 2025). Worldwide, Expedia had 3.6 million lodging properties on its marketplace, 2.4 million of them on Vrbo (Expedia annual report, 2025). Airbnb reported 5 million hosts globally (Airbnb annual report, 2025).

Two consequences for a founder. A hotel or host is almost certainly listed on one of these platforms already, so your product plugs into an existing flow. And most suppliers are no longer hotels. On Booking.com globally, alternative accommodation made up 37% of room nights in Q2 2026 (Booking Holdings, Q2 2026). A product built only for hotel front offices misses most of the supplier base.

What the platforms keep: the take rate

The take rate is revenue as a share of gross bookings, the slice the platform keeps. The filings put it in a narrow band:

• Booking Holdings: 14.5% for 2025 and 14.4% in Q2 2026 (Booking Holdings, 2025 and Q2 2026).
• Expedia Group: 12.3% for 2025 and 12.7% in Q2 2026. Globally, its B2C brands kept 11.3% and its B2B channel, which supplies inventory and technology to partners, kept 13.6% (Expedia Group, 2025).
• Airbnb: 13.41% of gross booking value in 2025 (Airbnb, 2025).

The rate depends on the product. MakeMyTrip in India keeps 18.0% of gross bookings on hotels and packages, 10.3% on bus tickets and 6.4% on flights (MakeMyTrip, Q2 2026). By our calculation from those figures, a hotel booking earns the platform almost three times as much per dollar as a flight. That explains the strategy of every OTA: sell the flight to win the customer and earn on the room.

The infrastructure layer below the OTAs works on a fee per booking rather than a percentage. Sabre, one of the global distribution systems (GDS) that connect airlines and hotels to agencies, earned an average of $6.30 per booking in Q2 2026 (Sabre, Q2 2026). But globally 43.6% of Sabre's 2025 revenue went back to travel agencies and other partners as incentive payments (Sabre annual report, 2025). In this business you pay the party that controls demand to send bookings your way.

What they spend to win the guest

This is the number that matters most for a startup, and the filings are blunt about it.

• Booking Holdings spent $8,186 million on marketing worldwide in 2025, equal to 4.4% of gross bookings. In Q2 2026, marketing was 32.2% of revenue (Booking Holdings, 2025 and Q2 2026).
• Expedia's direct selling and marketing, mostly paid traffic from search engines and metasearch, was $7,349 million in 2025, or 49.9% of revenue (Expedia Group annual report, 2025).
• Airbnb spent $2,588 million on sales and marketing globally, 21% of revenue (Airbnb annual report, 2025).
• Trip.com Group in China spent 25% of net revenue on sales and marketing in Q2 2026 (Trip.com Group, Q2 2026).
• MakeMyTrip in India booked $106.8 million of customer inducement costs (discounts, incentives, loyalty) as a reduction of revenue in Q2 2026, against $48.8 million of marketing and promotion expenses (MakeMyTrip, Q2 2026).

Taken together, a quarter to a half of OTA revenue goes back into buying the next booking. Airbnb is the exception at 21%, and globally it also reports income from operations of 21% of revenue (Airbnb, 2025). A brand that travellers search for by name is a cost advantage worth tens of percentage points of revenue.

For a new marketplace this is uncomfortable. Competing for the same traveller through paid search means bidding against companies that spend billions a year on exactly that. A plan that assumes cheap paid acquisition of travellers is the first thing to stress-test.

Suppliers are already routing around the OTAs

The other side of the market is pushing toward direct bookings, and the data shows how far each kind of supplier has got.

Large hotel chains have done it at scale. IHG reports that 83% of its global room revenue in 2025 came through channels and sources it manages itself. Only 26% came from its own direct digital channels such as the website and app (IHG annual report, 2025). The rest of the chain's "direct" business is its loyalty programme, sales teams, voice and enterprise contracts. That is infrastructure an independent hotel does not have.

Independent hotels depend on third parties much more. In Canada, 88.3% of hotels and motels that sold online used a third-party website, while 81.3% used their own website and 32.3% a mobile app (Statistics Canada, 2021).

Travel agencies and tour operators in Europe sit in between. Across the EU, e-commerce brought in 49.59% of their turnover in 2025, and sales through their own website or app 41.72% (Eurostat, 2025). The spread between countries is wide. In Latvia, e-commerce was 62.42% of turnover; in Greece 17.6% and in Croatia 13.85% (Eurostat, 2025).

Regulation now supports this shift in the EU. Booking.com was designated a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, with obligations applying from 14 November 2024. Hotels and other suppliers may now offer better prices and conditions on their own websites and other channels than on Booking.com. They also get real-time, continuous access to the data generated by their own bookings on the platform (European Commission, DMA, 2024). For a direct-booking or data product, those two rules are the opening. A hotel can legally undercut the OTA on its own site, and it can pull its platform data into its own tools.

Where the growth is

The large platforms are growing slowly in volume. In Q2 2026, Booking's global room nights grew 5.3% and Expedia's 6% year on year, while Expedia's average daily rates worldwide rose 5% (company filings, Q2 2026). Faster lines in the filings:

• B2B and white-label. Expedia's global B2B gross bookings grew 20% in 2025, against 3% for its consumer brands (Expedia Group, 2025). Distribution through banks, airlines, loyalty programmes and other partners is growing faster than the consumer brands.
• Alternative stays. Airbnb's global gross booking value grew 16% in Q2 2026 (Airbnb, Q2 2026).
• India. MakeMyTrip's gross bookings grew 19.9% in constant currency in Q2 2026, with bus ticketing up 31.4% (MakeMyTrip, Q2 2026).

One channel is shrinking. Tripadvisor's global hotel metasearch revenue fell 23% year on year in Q2 2026 (Tripadvisor, Q2 2026). Price-comparison traffic sitting between the traveller and the OTA is losing value. A product whose model is "send clicks to booking sites" is building on a declining line.

What this means for your product

• Selling to suppliers beats competing for travellers. The supplier base is large (millions of listings on each platform) and fragmented. It also has a measurable cost to cut: a 12–15% commission on every OTA booking. A tool that moves even a few points of bookings to direct pays for itself in a way the hotel can calculate.
• Price against the commission, not against software budgets. The independent hotel already pays its distribution cost as a share of revenue. Pricing per direct booking or as a share of commission saved matches how the buyer already thinks.
• B2B distribution is the fast lane. If you want to be in the booking flow itself, the filings point to partner and embedded distribution, not a new consumer brand.
• Treat the DMA as product scope in the EU. Rate parity freedom and data access are rights hotels have but rarely use. Products that turn them into a workflow (rate management across own and third-party channels, using exported platform data) have a regulatory tailwind.
• Budget for trust. Travel fraud is a real cost for consumers. The US Federal Trade Commission received 58,347 reports of travel, vacation and timeshare fraud in 2024, with $274 million in reported losses and a median loss of $922 (FTC, 2024). A new marketplace has to earn trust the incumbents already have.

The data is summarised on the Global Travel Distribution page of the Atlas, together with the European agency and tour operator statistics.

What the data does not tell you

• Commission rates paid by individual hotels. The take rate in the filings is an average across all products, markets and payment models. It is not the commission a given hotel pays, which depends on contract, country and visibility programmes.
• Independent hotels' direct share. IHG's 83% is a global chain with a loyalty programme. There is no comparable official figure for independent hotels in Europe or the US in this data set. The Canadian figures are from 2021.
• Your acquisition cost. OTA marketing spend shows the price of the category at scale. A niche product with organic demand or a B2B sales motion can have very different costs, and it should be measured on its own pilots.
• Small and private players. The figures come from listed companies and official statistics. Regional OTAs, bed banks and private channel managers do not publish comparable numbers.