Booking.com's commonly quoted commission for UK hotels is 15% of every booking before any extras, though the exact rate varies by property and location. Add the Preferred Partner Programme (+3%), Genius discounts and payment processing, and it's closer to 17–20%. A direct booking website won't replace Booking.com, but every guest you move from Booking.com to your own site saves most of that commission: about £48 on a typical £360 stay, after UK card fees. At that rate, a booking engine from around £89 a month pays for itself after roughly 23 moved bookings a year.
Below I work through a year of Booking.com commission using sourced UK rates. After that I cover what a hotel website needs if it's going to win direct bookings, and what to ask whoever builds it.
How much commission does Booking.com charge UK hotels?
The commonly quoted rate is 15%, and the effective rate is often 17–20% once the extras are added. Rates vary by property and location, so check your own contract and Booking.com's partner help page on commission. The typical base is 15% of the booking value, including any taxes the guest pays, and it's taken from the settlement before you're paid. That 15% is the starting point, not the total:
- Preferred Partner Programme: Booking.com's own partner pages say you pay 3% extra on top of your commission.
- Genius discounts: you fund a 10%, 15% or 20% discount for Booking.com's loyalty members. Commission still applies to the full pre-discount rate, so you pay for the discount and then pay commission on the price before it.
- Payments by Booking.com: if Booking.com collects payment for you, processing adds 1.1–3.1%.
Stack those up and plenty of properties end up paying 17–20% or more. Expedia is usually quoted higher, at 15–30%.
15%
Typical Booking.com commission, UK
+3%
Extra for Preferred Partner
17–20%
Typical effective rate with extras
15–30%
Expedia commission range
What does a year of Booking.com commission cost?
On £200,000 of room revenue through Booking.com, a UK hotel pays £30,000 a year in commission at 15%, £36,000 at 18% with Preferred Partner and £40,000 at 20% with extras. The £200,000 is my own example figure. The rates come from the sources above.
- 15% base30000£
- 18% with Preferred36000£
- 20% with extras40000£
Switch on Payments by Booking.com as well and processing can add another £2,200–£6,200 on that £200,000.
Now take a single booking. Three nights at £120 a night is £360:
| Channel | Fee on a £360 stay | What you keep |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com at 15% | £54.00 | £306.00 |
| Booking.com at 18% (Preferred) | £64.80 | £295.20 |
| Your own site, paid by card via Stripe | about £5.60 | about £354.40 |
The direct figure uses the standard UK card rate of 1.5% + 20p. Your booking engine may charge its own fee on top, which I come to below. Even so, each booking you move off Booking.com is worth about £48 at the 15% base rate and about £59 at the 18% Preferred rate.
Can a direct booking site pay for itself?
Yes, as long as you count bookings moved from Booking.com, not total bookings. Sticking with the £200,000 example, moving 10% of that revenue to your own site saves about £2,689 a year. Move 30% and it's about £8,067, before engine and site costs:
| Share moved to direct | Revenue moved | Commission saved at 15% | Card fees (approx.) | Net saving before engine and site costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10% | £20,000 | £3,000 | £311 | £2,689 |
| 20% | £40,000 | £6,000 | £622 | £5,378 |
| 30% | £60,000 | £9,000 | £933 | £8,067 |
Then take off the booking engine. Published prices for small UK hotels include eviivo from about £89 a month. Tribii has a free plan for up to 20 rooms. For a 10–30 room property, an engine plus a channel manager usually comes to €95–200 a month, roughly £80–170 depending on the exchange rate, before onboarding and payment fees.
At £89 a month the engine costs £1,068 a year, which about 23 moved bookings of £360 cover. For the website, take the quote you've been given and divide it by £48. That's roughly how many moved bookings it takes to pay back the build. My UK hotel website cost guide covers what a hotel site usually costs to build and what pushes the price up.
Direct bookings cancel less too
In HOTREC's 2026 European study, hotels reported a 9.1% cancellation rate on their own websites against 19.0% on Booking.com. Fewer rooms to resell is a saving on top of the commission.
Those cancellation figures come from the HOTREC European Hotel Distribution Study 2026. The same study found European hotels took 51.3% of bookings direct and 29.9% through OTAs.
Should a hotel leave Booking.com completely?
Usually not. For most hotels, Booking.com is still the best way to reach guests who've never heard of you. OTAs bring in people who'd never have found you otherwise, and many direct bookings start with a guest discovering the hotel on an OTA first. The realistic goal is to keep Booking.com for discovery, and make sure that when a guest goes looking for your own website, booking there is quicker and better value.
| Factor | Booking.com | Your own direct booking site |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per booking | Typically 15%, 17–20% with extras | Card fees plus engine subscription |
| New guests who don't know you | Strong | Weak unless you invest in SEO and ads |
| Guest email and contact data | Limited | Yours to keep |
| Offers and packages | Within OTA rules | Whatever you want to sell |
| Reported cancellation rate (HOTREC) | 19.0% | 9.1% |
| Up-front cost | None | Website build plus setup |
Before you price direct rooms below your Booking.com rate, read the rate and parity terms in your OTA contract. If you can't undercut on price, give direct guests something extra instead, like free breakfast, late checkout or a bottle waiting in the room.
What does a hotel website need to win direct bookings?
It needs to get a guest to the booking engine's payment page in as few taps as possible: rooms first, deep links, direct-only offers, reviews on the page and proper tracking. A pretty brochure site won't do that on its own. You're trying to take someone from "I've heard of this place" to a paid booking. These are the parts I'd focus on:
- 1
Rooms first
Put rooms and rates high on the homepage and on every room page, with a Book button that opens the engine already set to that room.
- 2
Deep links to the engine
Each room, offer and package links to the matching page in the booking engine, not to a generic search screen.
- 3
Offers only direct guests get
A clear best-rate or perks message near the Book button, plus an offers page you can update without a developer.
- 4
Reviews on the page
Real Google reviews next to the rooms, so guests don't leave to check you on an OTA and book there instead.
- 5
Tracking that follows the booking
GA4 and Tag Manager set up so a click on Book, and ideally the completed booking, is recorded against the page and campaign that drove it.
I've built both sides of this for UK hotels. For Crowne Plaza London Kingston, I rebuilt the site on WordPress and Elementor with each room linked to its IHG booking page, plus meeting enquiry forms and promo popups for offers. On a franchise hotel the brand's engine handles the booking itself, so the website has one job: get guests to the right room on that engine without sending them round the houses.
For Warren House, a Kingston hotel and wedding venue, I built a new Elementor Pro homepage with a video hero, rooms placed first and Google reviews on the page. It's a layout worth copying: someone deciding where to stay wants to see the rooms and know other guests liked them.
I can't give you booking uplift figures from either project. What I can tell you is that the structure above is what I'd put on any hotel site that has to compete with its own Booking.com listing. My post on what a hotel or restaurant website needs to take bookings goes through each piece in more detail.
How do you track whether direct bookings are actually growing?
Put a GA4 event on every Book click, set up cross-domain measurement into the booking engine, and compare direct revenue with OTA revenue every month. This is the most common gap on hotel sites. The booking engine usually sits on a different domain, so without cross-domain tracking GA4 credits the booking to the engine rather than your offer page or Google Ads campaign. Ask for:
- A GA4 event on every Book click, with the room or offer name attached.
- Cross-domain measurement or a purchase event from the engine, if your engine supports it.
- A simple monthly check: direct revenue against OTA revenue, and commission paid against what the website and engine cost.
The GA4 and Google Tag Manager setup I use on landing pages works just as well for hotel room and offer pages.
What about meetings, weddings and events?
Send these straight to your own site. They're rarely booked through OTAs, and they're often the most valuable enquiries a hotel gets. A meeting room page needs a short enquiry form that drops into your CRM. A ticketed night, say a Christmas party or a supper club, can take payment directly through Stripe. I build booking and event landing pages with Stripe, HubSpot forms and GA4 for venues and hotels, so that money never goes near a commission platform.
What should you ask a developer before you hire?
Ask about booking engine deep links, the mobile layout, whether your team can edit things themselves, GA4 tracking, schema and how they'll protect your SEO. These are the questions I'd want answered:
- Which booking engines have you linked to, and can each room button deep-link to the right room and dates?
- Will rooms and rates be above the fold on mobile?
- Can my team update offers, prices and popups without calling you?
- How will you track a click from my site through to a completed booking in GA4?
- Will you add Hotel schema markup (my free Schema Markup Generator shows what it looks like) and keep the site fast on Core Web Vitals?
- If this is a redesign, how will you keep the rankings and redirects from the old site?
The tracking question matters most. If they can't answer it clearly, you'll never know whether the site is actually beating the Booking.com commission.
How do you work out what OTA commission costs you?
Add up last year's commission from your Booking.com and Expedia invoices, divide by 12, and put that monthly figure next to the cost of a proper direct booking setup. If you'd like help planning a rooms-first hotel site, wiring it into your booking engine and tracking direct revenue properly, book a 20-minute call and bring those invoice totals with you.
