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The OTA Duopoly Has Become Two Different Ecosystems

If you still think of Expedia and Booking.com as two competitors fighting for the same hotel commission, you’re working with a 2015 mental model. The 2026 reality is far more interesting — and far more consequential for your distribution strategy.

The travel distribution landscape has fundamentally shifted. Expedia Group and Booking Holdings have moved beyond simple rivalry into something stranger: two parallel ecosystems with different goals, different revenue models, and different views of what an OTA is even for. The traditional boundaries between FIT travelers, wholesalers, and OTAs have almost entirely collapsed — and a lot of the action is now happening in places hoteliers can’t see.

Here’s what’s actually changed, why it matters, and what it means for the channel mix you’re managing right now.

1. The Death of the “Pure” Wholesaler

Historically, wholesalers (Hotelbeds, WebBeds, the old-school bed banks) bought rooms in bulk and resold them to travel agents and tour operators. That model is being eaten alive by the OTAs themselves.

Expedia Group B2B (formerly Private Label Solutions) has become the company’s fastest-growing division. In Q3 2025, B2B gross bookings grew 26% year-over-year — Expedia’s 17th consecutive quarter of double-digit B2B expansion. By the company’s own most recent count, the B2B network now connects hotels with 70,000 vetted partners worldwide — including major banks, airlines, retailers, and offline travel agencies.

Booking Holdings is doing the same thing in reverse. Skift reports that Booking is rolling its Booking.com, Priceline, and Agoda partnership teams into a single B2B division — a clear signal that the company is no longer treating B2B as a side bet.

The impact: small, independent wholesalers can’t match this. They can’t match the technology stack, they can’t match the inventory, and they can’t match the partner reach. The B2B layer is consolidating into the OTAs themselves — and the rate that used to live behind a tour-operator firewall is now flowing through APIs that touch dozens of consumer-facing destinations.

2. Market Share & the “Gatekeeper” Dynamic

The two giants don’t dominate every market the same way:

  • Booking Holdings dominates Europe. In 2025, Booking.com held roughly 71.2% of European online hotel bookings, with Expedia Group a distant second around 11%.
  • Expedia leads in the U.S. In core OTA leisure and unmanaged business travel, Phocuswright research has shown Expedia + Booking together capturing the overwhelming majority of the U.S. OTA market — with Expedia’s mix of brands (Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity) carrying the domestic flag.
  • Regulators are now treating Booking like a utility. On May 13, 2024, the European Commission designated Booking.com as a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Compliance kicked in November 13, 2024 — meaning Booking can no longer enforce “wide parity” clauses that prevented European hotels from offering lower rates on their own channels.

On paper, the gatekeeper designation gives hotels their pricing leverage back. In practice, it’s pushed Booking into a more defensive posture and given Expedia — which is not a designated gatekeeper — more freedom to operate with opaque pricing, member-only rates, and B2B fences that public metasearch can’t see.

3. Two Strategies: “Control” vs. “Enablement”

The two giants have taken genuinely different paths:

Booking Holdings: “The Connected Trip”

Booking’s strategy is total customer ownership. They want you booking your flight, hotel, taxi, restaurant (OpenTable), and activities all inside one app. It’s a high-margin, B2C-first play built around their dominant European hotel position — and it’s why they’re the ones absorbing the heaviest regulatory pressure.

Expedia Group: “The Operating System of Travel”

Under CEO Ariane Gorin, Expedia has pivoted toward being the infrastructure of travel. They make money whether or not the traveler ever sees an Expedia-branded site — by powering the booking engines for partners like Walmart, Mastercard, Capital One, Ryanair, and dozens of bank loyalty programs. Per White Sky Hospitality, this is what’s letting Expedia “encircle” Booking in markets where it can’t beat them at the top of the consumer funnel.

And the strategy is paying off. On Expedia’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Gorin said two-thirds of bookings now come from “direct engagement” — travelers who start their planning journey on an Expedia Group brand. The unified loyalty program (One Key, which combined Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo) is the connective tissue holding it together.

4. What This Looks Like in the U.S.

If you’re managing a U.S. property — which most BRMS clients are — here’s the channel-mix reality you’re operating inside:

Within the OTA segment

  • Expedia Group leads. Its mix of legacy U.S. brands (Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity) keeps it the dominant gatekeeper for domestic travelers.
  • Booking Holdings is smaller in the U.S. It captures international inbound travelers and younger Genius/Priceline loyalty members.
  • The rest (Airbnb, Hopper, niche players) splits the remainder.

Across all online U.S. travel

Direct-to-supplier (brand.com sites for hotels, airline.com for flights) is still the largest single channel — driven by aggressive “Book Direct” campaigns from Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and others. OTAs sit behind that. And GDS (Sabre, Amadeus) still handles the bulk of corporate travel — though Expedia’s B2B arm is aggressively attacking that lane by powering the booking engines for corporate travel desks and bank loyalty platforms.

The new reality: it’s all blended

The “direct vs. OTA vs. GDS vs. wholesaler” framing that we’ve used for 20 years doesn’t map cleanly anymore. When a Capital One cardholder books your hotel through their card portal, that’s an Expedia B2B booking — but it shows up looking like a corporate or affiliate channel. When a Booking.com guest gets to your front desk, you don’t know whether they came through Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, or some Booking Holdings B2B reseller.

5. What Hoteliers Should Take From This

Three things to internalize:

  • Your “channel mix” report is lying to you. If you’re not segmenting OTA bookings by source ID and watching for B2B flows hidden inside what looks like retail OTA volume, you’re flying blind. The rate that closed at your front desk may have traveled a much longer path than your PMS thinks.
  • Direct strategy now has to compete with infrastructure, not marketing. You’re no longer competing with the Expedia website. You’re competing with every loyalty program, bank portal, and corporate travel desk that runs on Expedia’s API. “Book direct” copywriting alone won’t move the needle. Pricing, value-adds, and loyalty fencing have to.
  • The DMA is a preview, not the final answer. Parity restrictions are softening, but the OTAs are responding by getting more opaque about the rates they distribute, not less. The question for 2026 isn’t “do I have rate parity?” It’s “do I have rate integrity?”

That second question — rate integrity — is where the real damage is happening right now. We’ll get into that in the next post.

Vicki Gideon, Founder and President, Bridgetown Revenue Management Solutions

Ready to audit your channel mix?

If you’re not sure how much of your business is flowing through B2B layers you can’t see, or whether your current OTA strategy is working in this new landscape, that’s exactly the kind of work BRMS does. Bridgetown Revenue Management Solutions has helped 150+ hotels rebuild distribution strategies that fit the 2026 ecosystem — not the 2018 one.

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