Booking.com Is Not Your Partner: It Competes to Own Your Guest
Booking.com can deliver visibility, conversion and demand, but its interests diverge from those of the hotel when the battle begins for guest data, communication and the next booking. Here is how to use OTAs without surrendering commercial control of the guest.
There are business relationships that feel more comfortable while we avoid defining them. Booking.com sends bookings, provides international visibility, facilitates conversion and helps fill rooms that, on certain dates, might be difficult to sell through other channels. The hotel provides inventory, reputation, service, availability and an experience that the platform could never create on its own. Both parties benefit from the transaction and, precisely for that reason, we have ended up calling partner an organisation whose interests only partially align with our own.
I have taken part in many distribution discussions in which Booking.com production is analysed with a mixture of gratitude, concern and resignation. Volume is celebrated, commission is regretted and there is a promise to boost direct bookings as soon as there is time, budget or a somewhat quieter season. Yet the decisive issue almost never appears in the production report. The question is not only how much business the platform delivers, but who retains control of the guest after generating the booking.
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