In thirty years around hotels, I have paid a lot of commissions. Travel agents in the eighties took ten percent and earned it - they brought the guest to a hotel he had never heard of. The OTAs took fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five, and told us it was the cost of being found. This month, in Europe, someone finally started reading that bill out loud.
Italy's competition authority has opened a probe into Booking's Preferred Partner programme - the one where a hotel pays more commission to appear higher in the list. In Türkiye, hotels are being invited to join a collective claim for compensation. And eighteen months after Europe banned Booking's rate-parity clauses, an industry review finds that not much has changed. Hotels hoped freedom from parity would bring the guests direct. Mostly, it did not.
Now come home.
1. Our middleman is bigger than theirs. MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, one company, hold more than half of India's online travel bookings - over ten billion dollars of gross bookings a year. The European hotels complain about Booking's grip. The Indian standalone owner deals with a platform that has even more market power and far less scrutiny.
2. Nobody is coming to help. Italy has a competition authority reading the fine print. India has no AGCM for hotels, and the courts move slowly. If you run a 40-room property in Jaipur or Coorg and you are waiting for a regulator to fix your commission, you will wait a long time.
3. The parity habit is ours, not theirs. Whatever contracts say after Europe, most Indian owners still hold the same rate everywhere, because the market manager asks nicely and the extranet makes it easy. The OTA is not stopping you from rewarding your direct guest. Your own rate discipline is.
So what should an independent owner actually do? Four things, none of them expensive.
4. Win the search you already own. For most Indian hotels, the first page a guest sees is not the OTA - it is the Google map result. Google Business Profile, current photos, answered reviews, correct rates flowing through Google Hotel Center. This costs time, not commission.
5. Read your channel manager's bill. Ask a plain question: which channels does my inventory flow to, at what net rate, and who sets the price the guest actually sees? Many owners cannot answer this. That is the problem in one sentence.
6. Make direct worth it. You will never outspend the platform. You can out-care it. A flexible checkout, breakfast thrown in, a phone number a human answers - the guest who books direct should get something the OTA cannot list in a filter.
7. Keep the guest. Every checkout is a chance to capture a name and an email properly. A returning guest who books direct is the one booking no platform can tax.
A word of caution from an old hotelier. Do not declare war on the OTAs. They bring real demand, especially to a property nobody has heard of, and the owner who delists in a temper usually relists within a quarter. The answer is not to leave the middleman. It is to stop being only his inventory. Build your direct trickle into a stream while the OTA tap is still running, because one day, as Europe is discovering, you will want both taps - and you will want to own one of them.
The bill is coming due everywhere. In India it will arrive quietly, without a regulator's headline. Read it now, while reading is still free.
HPRD
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