HOTREC has released its Europe Hotel Room Supply Channels 2024 survey, which examines recent developments and trends in the European accommodation sector and captures the ways in which guests book hotels.

The main findings of the survey confirm the need for the proper implementation of the Digital Marketing Act (DMA), ensuring a fairer and more balanced treatment of hoteliers than Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).

The research was conducted in early 2024 in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Valais, Switzerland (HES-SO Valais Wallis). This is the sixth survey in a row since 2014, with the aim of monitoring the evolution of European hotel room supply channels with a particular emphasis on the role of online travel agencies (OTAs).

The main conclusions of this year’s research are:

  • Over the past 10 years, OTAs have gained an average of 10% market share in the European hotel sector, highlighting their growing influence.
  • Sales channels for European hotels are returning to pre-pandemic trends where direct bookings continue to decline.
  • Hotels rely heavily on OTAs for bookings, especially smaller hotels with fewer rooms
  • The two dominant players in the hotel accommodation market are Booking Holdings and Expedia Group. Booking has a 71% share of the OTAs market, up 10% over the last 10 years. Expedia has a market share of close to 15%, up 2% over the past 2 years.
  • OTAs arbitrarily set prices in 4 out of 10 cases. Also, their offers come from multiple sources, listing prices and availability of other OTAs on their own platform, negatively affecting 1 in 2 hotels in Europe.
  • Online room availability accounts for 45% of nights booked in real time through online channels (online travel agencies, social media, online booking engines on hotel websites, etc.).

HOTREC President Alexandros Vassilikos made the following statement:

“Despite the great efforts and investments made by hotels in Europe for their digital transformation, in many cases we still do not have full control over the sales of our own product. We invest to provide the highest possible quality services at the best possible prices, however many times our efforts fall into the void due to the technological giants that mediate and arbitrarily determine the terms of sale and this comes at the expense of consumers, hotels and especially of the smaller ones. So a new balanced relationship with Online Travel Agencies is needed and in this direction it is very important that we succeeded in forcing platforms like Booking to comply with specific rules. We continue the effort at the European level to implement the Digital Markets Act (DMA) firmly and to establish fair digital rules that will guarantee free competition in European hospitality.”