OTA Commissions

The direct answer: Activities are where AI travel planning is strongest at the top of the funnel and weakest at the bottom — and that combination quietly redirects tour operators’ demand into commission channels. Among travelers who use AI for travel planning, the single most common use is discovering activities and restaurants (65%), ahead of finding destinations (56%) and building itineraries (55%) (TakeUp AI Research, April 2026). Meanwhile, only 17% of travelers have used AI to book an activity, even though 69% have used AI to plan or book a trip overall, and one in three trip-planning sessions now starts with AI (GetYourGuide/Arival research, 2026). That is the 65/17 gap: AI answers decide what travelers do, then hand the transaction to whatever bookable link sits closest to the recommendation — usually a marketplace taking 20–30% commission (Samba HQ OTA commission tracker, August 2026). For an operator, the strategic response is not to fight AI discovery — it is to be the named business in the answer and to make your own site the path of least resistance from that mention to a confirmed booking. ...

The short answer AI travel planners are structurally biased toward OTAs, and loyalty is the one asset they cannot price into the comparison. When US travelers let AI help book a hotel in 2026, only 38% of those transactions went to the hotel’s own channel — 44% landed on an OTA and 8% were completed inside the AI tool itself, a share that will grow as Google rolls out agentic booking (NPS Prism/Dynata survey of 2,287 US AI travelers, published August 14, 2026; Skift, August 7, 2026). Four in ten of those bookers said AI changed which hotel they chose — it did not just narrow the search, it altered the outcome. ...

The short answer ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized ad revenue run rate within 200 days of launch, is now live in more than 60 countries, and travel has been an allowed advertising category since day one — Expedia was among the very first buyers in the February 2026 US pilot (OpenAI, August 31, 2026; Adweek, February 19, 2026). For hotels, tour operators and DMCs this creates a new dual-contest reality inside one chat window: the organic answer — which property ChatGPT recommends unprompted — is decided by generative engine optimization, while the labeled ad unit placed beneath that answer is sold to whoever bids, and OpenAI states ads do not influence the answer above them. Your hotel can be the one ChatGPT names while an OTA pays to sit directly underneath that recommendation, capturing the click on your own inventory. ...

The short answer Rate parity is over in the European Economic Area — and as of September 28, 2026, the European Commission has put that in writing, with teeth. Hotels, car rentals and other accommodation providers active on Booking.com in the EEA can freely set their prices and conditions on and off the platform, including on their own direct channel. Booking.com no longer uses external prices for its default ranking, for Genius, Preferred or Preferred Plus eligibility — and, as of September 2026, not even for its Booking Sponsored Benefit. The “competitive” and “non-competitive” labels that used to appear in the Extranet have been removed entirely (European Commission DMA factsheet, September 28, 2026). ...

The short answer Yes — an AI agent can now complete a travel booking end to end, and the hotel leg of that pipeline is next. On May 6, 2026, Mindtrip launched what it calls travel’s first all-in-one agentic booking experience: a traveler describes a trip in chat, the agent queries live inventory through Sabre, and PayPal completes payment inside the conversation — no redirect to any website (Sabre press release, May 6, 2026). Flights came first; hotel booking was explicitly next on the partnership roadmap announced in February (Skift, February 12, 2026). ...

The short answer Yes — AI travel planners recommend different hotels for different travelers, and the differences are large enough to decide who gets booked. The most comprehensive public dataset on the question — Nicolas Sitter’s AI Hotel Landscape index (19,579 AI runs, 2,500 unique prompts, 25 cities, 8 traveler personas, 9 hotel types, 245,046 cited sources; data collected December 2025–January 2026, updated June 2026) — shows the same models surface a different competitive set for a family than for a solo business traveler, and route those personas to very different places to book. ...

The short answer In Google AI Mode, Google keeps the click — and that is quietly the best news for direct bookings in years. The largest public measurement of hotel results inside Google’s AI Mode (Nicolas Sitter, Google AI Mode Hotel Study 2026, published February 3, 2026) analyzed 4,000 queries across 8 cities — Paris, London, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna and Bordeaux — capturing 6,130 interactive hotel links and 84,329 source citations. Of every hotel link a traveler can click in an AI Mode answer, 79.1% lands on a Google Business Profile, 16.6% goes directly to the hotel website, and just 3.6% goes to an OTA. Because roughly 97% of those Business Profiles then link onward to the hotel, the study estimates an effective direct-access rate of about 93%. ...

The short answer The OTAs are not being disintermediated by AI travel planners. They are buying and building their way into owning the AI booking layer instead. Expedia Group acquired Layla, the Berlin-based conversational AI trip planner, in July 2026 (Skift, July 31, 2026). Booking Holdings is running at least five consumer-facing AI experiments, with Priceline’s revamped agentic assistant Penny cited by executives as the standout early performer on satisfaction, engagement and conversion (Skift, September 14, 2026). OpenAI, after testing direct transactions, stepped back in March 2026 and refocused ChatGPT on discovery — routing live pricing and checkout through partner apps, starting with Expedia and Booking.com. And Google’s AI Mode hotel booking launched on August 27, 2026 with ten partners: five chains, and five OTAs. ...

The short answer The 2026–27 holiday booking window opened in early September, and the shortlist is increasingly drafted by AI. Travel editors were already telling consumers in the first week of September 2026 to book Thanksgiving travel immediately and start shopping Christmas fares, with domestic holiday-period airfares running 18% above last year (Southern Living, September 4, 2026, citing The Points Guy and Dollar Flight Club data). Meanwhile, the research layer underneath has changed: 37% of US travelers planning summer trips used AI to help plan them (Allianz Partners Global Travel Confidence Index, Ipsos polling of 2,001 US adults, fielded March 20–April 14, 2026), roughly six in ten Japanese travelers used generative AI for summer trip planning (Japan Times, July 13, 2026), and UK travelers now lead Europe in AI-assisted holiday planning (Hotel-Online, June 11, 2026). If your hotel, tour operation or DMC is not machine-citable — structured, factual, fresh and findable — you won’t lose the holiday booking. You’ll be excluded from consideration before a human ever sees your name. ...

The short answer Agentic booking is the moment an AI assistant stops handing a traveler a list of hotel names and instead checks live availability, compares total prices, and completes the reservation itself — no website visit, no booking form, no OTA checkout page. The plumbing for this already exists: Stripe and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (launched September 2025), Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (unveiled at NRF in January 2026), and booking agents from Expedia, Sabre, and Mindtrip. If your property or tour inventory isn’t machine-readable and transactable, the agent will route the booking to whoever’s is — and in travel, “whoever’s is” today means an OTA API. The window to become the agent-bookable direct option is open now, and it will close fast. ...