How price gaps are undermining direct hotel bookings

In today’s fragmented hotel distribution landscape, ensuring price consistency across channels is not just a question of revenue — it’s a matter of trust. When a guest sees a different rate for the same room across platforms, it erodes credibility and weakens the hotel’s direct booking power. And yet, disparities persist. Some are genuine. Others are manufactured.

Recent data from the May 2025 World Parity Monitor highlights how visibility — and the resources needed to secure it — have become central to OTA strategy. Major OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia Group dominate paid impression share by consistently investing in top placements across Google Hotel Ads. In May 2025, Booking.com held over 80% of paid visibility in key markets such as France, Italy, and Spain. This dominance isn’t accidental — it’s the result of high bidding power, data-driven targeting, and sustained marketing budgets that smaller OTAs can rarely match.

This imbalance in visibility explains why smaller OTAs often resort to alternative tactics — primarily aggressive pricing. In Argentina, for example, Despegar.com held a lower share of paid impressions than Booking, but showed a significantly higher Lose rate, meaning it undercut direct hotel prices more frequently. The same pattern appears in India with MakeMyTrip, which, despite holding modest visibility compared to global giants, leverages undercutting to attract bookings

In this fractured ecosystem, visibility is not evenly distributed — and pricing integrity becomes the first casualty. While major players dominate screens, others win clicks through artificial undercutting or flash promotions, creating confusion for guests and compromising direct sales potential. In this context, trust — not just pricing — becomes the key battleground for the hotel’s direct channel.

Understanding how and why these disparities occur is the first step to reclaiming control.

When Clickbait Becomes a Conversion Killer

A growing concern among hoteliers is the rise of fictitious disparities—those discrepancies that appear on OTAs and metasearch platforms but disappear once the user clicks through. The damage, however, is already done. The click is lost, and so is the booking.

Travellers may see a hotel in Madrid on a metasearch platform advertised by an OTA at €135 rate — which is noticeably lower than the hotel’s direct rate of €150 - when they click through to the OTA, the price is actually €150, matching the hotel’s official rate. The lower price never existed — it was only shown to attract the click. Even though the hotel maintains rate integrity, this kind of fictitious disparity can distort guest perception, even when no actual price difference exists.

These aren’t system errors. They’re deliberate tactics. By displaying a lower rate that vanishes on the final booking screen, some intermediaries attract traffic under false pretenses — hijacking the user journey and distorting purchase decisions. For hotels, the result is a double loss: no conversion and reduced visibility for the direct channel.

While some cases may stem from unauthorized practices such as scraping or rate leakage through bedbanks, the majority originate from contracted distribution partners. These intermediaries manipulate how prices are displayed — often to boost click-through rates or gain a competitive edge. This highlights the importance for hoteliers to regularly review distribution agreements and ensure partnerships are built on transparency and aligned incentives.

Visibility Without Integrity Isn’t Enough

Metasearch was once hailed as the great equalizer — a space where hotels could compete fairly with OTAs. But when either OTAs or metasearch platforms manipulate how prices are displayed, that balance quickly disappears. Even if a hotel’s direct rate is competitive, potential guests may never reach the official website if another listing shows what appears to be a lower price — whether accurate or not.

That’s why identifying not just who is undercutting you, but also how, has become essential. Because not every disparity is real—but every disparity has real consequences.

From Detection to Action: A Strategic Imperative

The value of monitoring price discrepancies lies not only in awareness but in the ability to respond effectively. Identifying a disparity is only the first step — what truly drives impact is a structured response strategy that mitigates revenue loss and protects the hotel’s visibility in real time.

Hotels need tools that go beyond passive reporting. What’s required is a framework that enables:

● Differentiation between real and fictitious disparities – verifying whether the lower rate actually exists on the OTA, or if it was a misleading display tactic.

● Identification of offenders and their origin – understanding which intermediary (OTA, bedbank, or reseller) is causing the disparity, and whether it’s recurring or market-specific.

● Actionable follow-up – including filing contractual violation claims with the OTA, pausing metasearch bidding if the direct rate appears less competitive, or triggering automated rate adjustments in the OTA channel (without lowering the direct rate).

Responding quickly is critical. If left unchecked, even a short-term disparity can cause a long-term impact — eroding guest trust, redirecting bookings, and damaging your positioning in competitive search results. What used to take hours — spotting discrepancies, verifying them, gathering screenshots — is now possible in minutes. That’s the shift the industry needs: from reactive problem-solving to proactive rate integrity management.

Best Practices to Strengthen Direct Conversion

As part of your revenue management, distribution and pricing activities, it’s advisable to have the right level of balances and checks in place to maintain your price integrity:

● Monitor OTA behaviour regularly: Even if you price competitively, third-party distributors may apply markups or discounts that break parity.

● Deploy real-time tools: Solutions that enable dynamic responses to disparities reduce manual oversight and protect conversion.

● Leverage metasearch insights: Tools integrated with platforms like Google Hotel Ads can correct mismatches at the source of user entry.

● Protect the decision window: Combine price matching with features like price alerts to stay connected with high-intent visitors who leave without booking.

Stay ahead in pricing strategy

In a landscape where OTA aggressiveness is increasingly tied to how hotels position their prices, it’s essential to proactively protect the integrity of the direct channel. That means ensuring your direct strategy stays competitive in real time — so that when potential guests compare prices, they consistently find a compelling reason to book on your official site.

For hotels — especially Hotel Groups — this is a strategic advantage to driving more profitability. After all, when pricing issues are resolved faster, payments are released sooner. Hotels that act quickly on disparities not only improve parity — by 62% on average — but also see a 10x boost in how quickly they unlock pending revenue.

Clarity, consistency, and confidence are what turn interest into conversion. Therefore, direct pricing matters more than ever.