Why Are Millions of Travellers Still Overpaying for Hotels?

Key Takeaways

• The average traveler overpays for hotels by 15 to 25 percent every time they book through a major platform.
• This is not accidental. It is how OTAs are designed to make money.
• Wholesale pricing, the rate travel agents and corporate buyers access, is now available to anyone through Stailonga at no cost.
• The savings are real, consistent, and require no loyalty program, no credit card points, and no membership fee.

Table of Contents ▼

1. Most People Do Not Know They Are Overpaying
2. Where the Markup Actually Comes From
3. Loyalty Programs Are Not the Answer
4. Booking Direct Is Better but Still Not the Best
5. What Wholesale Access Actually Looks Like
6. Do the Math on Your Next Trip

Most People Do Not Know They Are Overpaying

If you have ever booked a hotel through Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, or any of the major online travel platforms, you have almost certainly paid more than you needed to. Not by a trivial amount either. Industry data consistently puts the markup somewhere between 15 and 25 percent above what the same room can be accessed for through wholesale channels.

That is not a rounding error. On a five-night stay at a $200 per night hotel, that is somewhere between $150 and $250 in unnecessary spending. On a longer trip, a more expensive property, or a multi-room booking for a family or group, the number climbs quickly.

The reason most people do not know this is happening is that the platforms are very good at presenting their prices as if they were simply the price of the room. There is no line item showing platform commission. No footnote explaining the markup. The number you see looks like what the hotel charges. It is not.

According to reporting from The Guardian Travel and travel industry analysts at Phocuswire, online travel agencies collectively generate tens of billions of dollars annually from the gap between what hotels charge and what consumers pay. The business model depends on that gap remaining invisible.

Where the Markup Actually Comes From

To understand why the markup exists, it helps to understand how the relationship between hotels and booking platforms works.

When a hotel lists its rooms on Booking.com or Expedia, it typically agrees to pay a commission on every booking made through that platform. Commission rates vary but tend to sit between 15 and 25 percent of the room rate. The hotel factors that commission into the price it sets on the platform, which means the cost of using the platform gets passed directly to you, the person booking the room.

On top of the commission structure, some platforms also operate a merchant model, where they purchase room inventory at a contracted wholesale rate and then sell it to consumers at a marked-up retail price. The difference between what they paid and what you paid is their margin.

Either way, by the time the price reaches your screen, it has passed through at least one layer of commercial interest that had no motivation to keep it low.

The rate parity problem

For years, major OTAs required hotels to sign rate parity agreements, contracts that prevented hotels from offering lower prices on their own websites than on the platform. This meant that even if a hotel wanted to pass savings on to direct bookers, they were contractually prevented from doing so.

Rate parity clauses have faced increasing legal scrutiny in Europe and elsewhere. Several countries have moved to restrict or ban them. But the legacy of a decade of enforced rate parity is that many travelers still assume the price on any platform is the market price. For most rooms booked through retail channels, it is. For rooms accessed through wholesale channels, it is not.

Loyalty Programs Are Not the Answer

The travel industry’s standard response to the overpaying problem is the loyalty program. Accumulate points, reach elite status, unlock member rates, earn free nights. It sounds like a solution. In practice it is not, for most travelers.

Loyalty programs are designed to lock you into a single brand or platform. The points you earn with Hilton are worth nothing at Marriott. The status you build on Booking.com does not transfer to Expedia. Every program is an island, and the moment you need to book a property outside your preferred brand, you are back to paying retail with no benefit from any of the points you have accumulated elsewhere.

There is also a significant time cost. Building meaningful status in a hotel loyalty program typically requires dozens of qualifying nights per year. For the occasional or moderate traveler, the return is minimal relative to the behavioral constraints the program imposes on your booking choices.

Loyalty programs are a good deal for very frequent travelers who are heavily brand-loyal by preference. For everyone else, they are primarily a mechanism that keeps you booking through the same platform rather than looking for a better price elsewhere.

Booking Direct Is Better but Still Not the Best

Booking directly with the hotel is genuinely better than booking through a major OTA in several ways. Hotels keep the full rate rather than paying platform commission. They often offer perks to direct bookers: early check-in, room upgrades, complimentary breakfast, guaranteed late checkout. The relationship is more direct and problems are easier to resolve.

Consumer advocacy organizations including Consumer Reports have long recommended booking direct as a way to avoid platform fees and build a direct relationship with the property.

But direct booking still leaves you paying the hotel’s published retail rate. And the hotel’s published retail rate is not the wholesale rate. The gap between retail and wholesale exists regardless of whether you book through an OTA or directly with the property. You can eliminate the platform’s cut by going direct. You cannot access the wholesale tier that way.

Wholesale access has historically required being a travel agent, a corporate account holder, or a member of a trade buying organization. That is starting to change.

What Wholesale Access Actually Looks Like

The Stailonga AI Travel Concierge connects directly to B2B hotel inventory through a wholesale travel API, the same infrastructure that travel agents and corporate travel programs use to access below-retail rates. When you submit your trip details, the hotel options in your email are priced at wholesale rates, not retail ones.

There is no membership fee. No annual subscription. No minimum spend. You enter your destination, your dates, your budget range, and your travel preferences. The concierge builds a full itinerary and pulls live wholesale hotel pricing for your trip. Everything arrives in your inbox within a few minutes.

The savings vary depending on the destination, the property type, and the time of year. But across the inventory the platform accesses, the rates are consistently and meaningfully below what the same hotels list on Booking.com, Expedia, or their own websites.

If you already have a clear sense of the kind of hotel experience you want rather than a specific destination in mind, the Hotel Vibe Booking chatbot on the Stailonga homepage lets you describe your ideal stay in plain language and find matching properties at wholesale rates. Rooftop pool, boutique and design-forward, near the financial district, under $180 a night. That kind of search, which no filter system handles well, is exactly what the chatbot is built for.

Do the Math on Your Next Trip

The next time you are about to book a hotel, it is worth pausing before you confirm on Booking.com or Expedia and checking what the wholesale rate looks like first.

Take whatever you were about to pay, subtract 15 to 20 percent, and consider whether that difference matters to you over the course of the trip. On a short city break it might be a nice dinner. On a two-week vacation it might be another night in the hotel, an extra excursion, or simply money that stays in your pocket rather than going to a platform that had no part in making your trip good.

The wholesale tier is not a secret anymore. The infrastructure to access it exists, it is free to use, and the savings are real. The only reason millions of travelers are still paying retail rates is that most of them do not know there is an alternative.

Now you do. The AI Travel Concierge is free to try. Enter your next destination and see what comes back.

---

Stop paying retail rates for hotels.

The Stailonga AI Travel Concierge gives you access to the same wholesale hotel rates travel agents use, completely free. Enter your destination and dates and get a full travel blueprint with wholesale pricing sent straight to your inbox.Try the AI Travel Concierge FreeFind My Hotel by Vibe