Ask an owner what Booking.com costs and they will say fifteen percent. That is the number on the contract, and it is where the cost starts, not where it ends. We build websites for independent hotels, so we spend a lot of time looking at the other side of that number: what a direct booking costs instead, and what the gap is worth per night. This is the maths as honestly as we can lay it out, with the sources, and with the case for keeping the OTA at the end.
The commission is a floor
Booking.com's base commission for independent properties sits around fifteen percent. It is not published as a rate card; the exact figure lives in each property's contract and extranet, and it varies by country and property type. From there it stacks. Join the Genius loyalty programme and the guest's discount comes out of your rate. Join Preferred Partner for higher placement and the commission rises. Switch on a deal or a mobile rate and the effective take rises again. Guides that track these contracts put properties commonly in the 18 to 22 percent band once programmes are on, and Cloudbeds' guide gives a similar range for Booking, with Expedia typically higher for independents.
Then there is payment. If Booking handles the guest's card, there is a payment-handling fee on top, typically quoted at around 1.3 percent by Czech operators who have published their numbers. Small on its own. It is still a percentage point off every night.
The cancellation rate is the hidden line
This is the part that does not appear on the invoice. Cloudbeds' 2026 State of Independent Hotels report, built on 90 million bookings across tens of thousands of properties, puts the cancellation rate on OTA bookings at 21.8 percent. On direct bookings it is 10.6 percent. An OTA booking is twice as likely to disappear before the guest arrives, and the report notes that cancellations now happen further out, an average of 39 days before the stay, which is just far enough that you thought the room was sold.
A cancellation is not free even when the guest pays nothing. It is a night you held off the market, a rate you did not raise, a room that may or may not resell at a discount. Commission on the headline rate understates the OTA's cost. Commission per stayed night is the number that matters.
The maths per hundred nights
Take a €100 room night and a hundred bookings on each channel. The assumptions are stated so you can swap in your own.
Through the OTA, at 18 percent commission plus 1.3 percent payment handling, you keep €80.70 per booked night. At a 21.8 percent cancellation rate, 78 of the hundred bookings become stays. Revenue from a hundred OTA bookings: roughly €6,300.
Direct, the cost is not zero. There is card processing, the booking engine's fee, and a share of whatever you spend to be found. One 2026 analysis puts the all-in cost of a direct booking at around 4.5 percent; call it five to be safe. You keep €95 per booked night. At a 10.6 percent cancellation rate, 89 of the hundred become stays. Revenue from a hundred direct bookings: roughly €8,500.
Same room, same price, same hundred guests who wanted to stay. The direct channel returns about a third more revenue, and the difference is not the commission alone. Half of it is the cancellation gap.
What the OTA is still worth
None of that is an argument to leave Booking.com. The report that gives us the cancellation figure also shows why owners stay: OTA share of independent hotel bookings rose to 63.4 percent, from 61 a year earlier, and in some markets it approaches 80. The OTA is where guests who have never heard of you go to look. It is the low season, the new market, the German family who searched "hotel Prague 7" and not your name. Reach has a price and fifteen to twenty percent is, for that guest, a fair one.
The mistake is paying that price for the other guest. The one who searched your name. The one who stayed last year and wanted to come back. The one who read about you and went looking. That guest found your website, and the website sent them to Booking.com. The teardown of why that happens is the companion to this piece.
And since December 2024, Booking.com can no longer require you to match its price on your own site anywhere in the EU. What the end of parity clauses means for your website is the third piece in this set.
What we sell, and where we stop
We are Northbound Studio, a small studio in Prague, led by Martina Prethero. We design and build the pages guests use to compare rooms and book direct: the first screen, the rooms, the path to the book button, in the first four languages your guests search in. The booking engine you have stays. The Booking.com listing stays. We do not do revenue management, channel managers or your OTA contract. We make the direct channel the one a guest who already wants you can actually use.
If you want to know your own number
Send the current website URL and the town. The Website Review starts with the first screen, rooms and book path on a phone, and tells you whether the site is the reason your own guests are paying the OTA.