I guess the front desk has no discretion to give discounts, in smaller places the owner can give you the booking.com price because it means they don't have to give a cut (is it 30%?) to the bastards from Amsterdam.
I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".
I believe commissions are pretty standardized at 10-12% by now; OTAs have been competing on commission in the fight to sign up hotels.
The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.
I wonder if commissions have dropped a lot in the past ~5 years, or if your hotel just has a better rate. I remember hearing that average commission back then was in the 20% range (less for major chains with negotiating power), and I know that Booking/Expedia would be happy to kick down 8-12% for any traffic people referred to them. Any startup with zero volume could sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Expedia's availability and booking APIs and get 8% for each booking, and larger customers could negotiate that upwards. I think I saw 14% for one supplier, but I don't remember if that was Booking or Expedia or a smaller company.
That's incorrect. It's never been as high as 20%. That's a claim that I've seen frequently over the years on HN, but it was never the case, at least at Booking.com.
They have a few mechanisms to try and drive up commission from the usual 12%, though. They have a preferred program which boosts search results but costs
3%> They would have loved to drop it to better tune search, but they were addicted to the incremental revenue.
At various times there were also dynamic ranking boost efforts, where a hotel could increase boost their ranking (with a preview) by increasing the commission percentage. IIRC that went as high as 18%.
Both of those applied to the default search results order ONLY. If you clicked "order by price" or similar then you simply got that.
I have only recent direct experience (OTAs all being 10-12%), but I do know one recent change is that “AirBnB model” listings are turning up on Booking.com a lot more now (renting out your holiday home as if it were a hotel with one unit). I know AirBnB charges 20% commission (I think they call it a service fee), perhaps for these cases Booking.com is offering those operators 20% as well.
That makes perfect sense, they were the same type of single villa style. The biggest things I discovered is that while airbnb charges the host 3-4%, they charge the guest 9-15%. Booking.com reverses this and charges the guest no fees while the host has all the cost, 20% and the most risk if the charge/credit card was fraudulent.
I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".