Booking Holdings controls 68.8% of European online travel agency bookings — roughly 20.6% of all hotel room nights sold in Europe — according to the same HOTREC study a Booking.com executive cited on September 22 to argue that European hotel distribution is balanced.

Peter Lochbihler, Booking.com's global head of public affairs, published an article claiming that "no one could convincingly argue that hotels depend on a single online platform." His evidence: the 2026 European Hotel Distribution Study from HOTREC, the European hotel association, which shows no single OTA takes more than 20% of all bookings.

What does the arithmetic show?

HOTREC's study puts OTAs at 29.9% of European hotel bookings in 2025. Booking.com alone takes 66.1% of that OTA business. Multiply the two figures and Booking.com accounts for about 19.8% of all hotel bookings in Europe — one fifth of a point under the 20% line.

Count the parent company rather than the brand and the line is crossed. Booking Holdings, which also owns Agoda and Priceline, takes 68.8% of European OTA bookings, or about 20.6% of all hotel bookings on the continent.

The study's headline figure for direct bookings is 51.3%. Lochbihler's article claims "over 56%", a number taken from a chart credited to Statista rather than the study itself.

What did the article leave out?

Two findings on rate integrity went unmentioned:

• 51% of hotels say OTAs sell their rooms below the price they set
• 80% of those hotels never agreed to that discounting

For operators, those numbers feed directly into rate parity disputes and rank-and-file revenue management questions.

What does the EU court ruling change?

The timing is awkward for Booking. On September 9, thirteen days before the article appeared, the EU General Court dismissed Booking's challenge to the Commission's 2023 ban on its acquisition of Etraveli, the flight seller. In doing so, the court upheld the Commission's finding that Booking holds a dominant position in Europe's online hotel sales market, with a share close to 70%.

Booking said on the day of the ruling that it was considering a final appeal.

Why the 20% average hides your hotel's exposure

The European figure is an average, and it sits low because OTAs bring in less than a third of bookings across the study. Booking's grip on the OTA business barely shifts by hotel type:

• 68.8% across Europe overall
• 69.4% at independent hotels
• 56.3% at chain hotels, where Expedia takes roughly a third

The chains carry too little weight in the study to move the European figure. What actually decides Booking's share of an individual hotel is how much of that hotel's business runs through OTAs. An independent with 40% of room nights from OTAs and an average OTA split is looking at Booking.com taking about 28% of everything it sells. At 60% OTA dependence, Booking passes 40%.

HOTREC published the study while pressing the Commission to enforce the Digital Markets Act and to retain the rules requiring platforms to explain rankings and give notice before changing terms — rules the Commission has proposed repealing. The individual-hotel figures come from survey answers at 1,882 properties; the chain figures come from ten groups' own data.

What should operators do next?

Each hotel can compute its own exposure: add up twelve months of Booking.com room nights, plus Agoda's if applicable, and divide by total room nights for the same period. That figure, not any Brussels average, is what matters when a contract change, a rate parity question or a ranking drop lands on the general manager's desk.

Booking's potential final appeal to the EU's top court and the Commission's proposed repeal of platform transparency rules will determine how much leverage European hotels retain in 2026.