Your website decides the commission.

Picture a couple looking for a suite in Gstaad for Christmas, or a villa with hotel service in Marbella for a week in August. They often start on a booking platform, comparing photographs and reviews and drawing up a shortlist. Then they type the hotel’s name into a search engine and open its website. They want to see the suite as it really is, and to find out whether booking direct gets them something better.

I know of no reliable figure for how many guests take that route, and I am wary of anyone who quotes one without a source. But someone about to spend several thousand francs or euros on a week away looks twice before paying, and the booking is decided in those few minutes. If the hotel’s website convinces them, they book with you. If it keeps them waiting, confuses them or sends them to a page that seems to belong to another company, they go back to the platform and book there. The guest is the same; what changes is who earns a commission.

The guest is the same. What changes is who earns a commission.

What the figures say.

HotellerieSuisse and HES-SO Valais-Wallis have studied how Swiss hotels sell their rooms since 2003. Their latest edition, published in May 2026 with data for 2025 and responses from 171 hotels, shows two movements at once. Direct channels, from the telephone and email to booking on the hotel’s own website, still account for 58.5% of overnight stays. And real-time booking on the hotel’s website has grown from around 7.5% in 2015 to 20.9% in 2025: almost three times as much in ten years.

The platforms are not retreating, though. They accounted for 29.2% of overnight stays, slightly more than in the previous five years, and Booking Holdings takes around 73% of the bookings that pass through them. Across Europe, the study HOTREC published in September 2026, with 2025 data from more than 2,700 hotels, paints a similar picture: 51.3% of bookings come through the hotels’ own channels and 29.9% through platforms.

One finding in the Swiss study strikes me as more telling than the percentages. According to the hotels surveyed, bookings made on Booking.com are cancelled around 21% of the time, and those made on the hotel’s website around 10%. I would not apply that directly to a five-star hotel in Gstaad, since the survey covers hotels of every category. But it points in a direction any director of sales will recognise: a guest who books on your website has already chosen you, not a result in a list.

What the law now allows.

For years, Booking.com’s terms included so-called parity clauses, which stopped hotels from offering better conditions on their own website than on the platform. In Switzerland, an amendment to the Unfair Competition Act has banned such clauses in contracts between booking platforms and accommodation providers since 1 December 2022, whether on price, availability or conditions. In the European Union, since 14 November 2024, the Digital Markets Act has required Booking.com to let hotels offer better prices and conditions on other channels, including their own websites.

Commissions are under scrutiny too. In May 2025, the Swiss Price Supervisor concluded that Booking.com’s commissions to Swiss hotels were abusively high and ordered it to cut them by almost a quarter. Booking.com appealed.

Even so, the law does not settle everything. In 2025, 48% of the hotels in the Swiss study saw their price undercut on a platform, and 83% of those had not agreed to it. A guest who compares may find your hotel cheaper away from your website. All the more reason for your website to offer something that is not compared on price alone.

I read all this as a designer, not as a lawyer, and draw a practical conclusion. Today a hotel can make its own website the best place to book it. It can, but the law does not bring the guest there, nor convince them once they arrive. That is the website’s job.

Why guests go back to the platform.

At a luxury hotel, guests rarely go back to the platform to save a few francs. They go back because they feel safe there. When I look at hotel websites, I see four reasons again and again:

• The booking leaves the website. The button opens a booking engine with another design, another typeface and sometimes another language. Just as they are about to pay, guests feel they are somewhere else.
• The website is slow on mobile. Full-screen video and heavy photographs. Google considers a page good when its main content appears within 2.5 seconds and it responds to each tap within 200 milliseconds, in at least three visits out of four, measured separately on mobile and desktop.
• The website looks like all the others. The same drone footage over the lake, the same words. If it shows nothing the platform does not, there is no reason to stay.
• No one answers in time. The guest has a question, in their own language and at their own hour, and the reservations team replies the next day. On the platform, the booking button is still there.

That last reason matters more than it seems. In 2025, Swiss hotels recorded almost 44 million overnight stays, more than half of them by guests from abroad, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Guests from China alone accounted for close to 800,000. When one of them writes from Shanghai at nine in the morning, it is two in the morning in Gstaad in winter and three in summer, because China does not change its clocks and Switzerland does. Dubai is three hours ahead in winter and two in summer. Every unanswered question means a night of waiting, and the platform keeps no one waiting.

What the guest tells you.

A direct booking brings more than the commission saved: the conversation with the guest begins in your house. They tell you when they will arrive, whether they are travelling with children or what they are celebrating. Sometimes they mention an allergy or ask for an accessible room. Swiss data protection law treats data on health as sensitive personal data (art. 5), and requires the controller to take data protection into account from the planning stage and, by default, to limit processing to what is necessary (art. 7). In Spain the GDPR applies, and it too gives health data special protection (art. 9).

For a designer, that turns every form and every assistant into a design decision. An AI concierge that books a table and notes an allergy is processing health data. Asking only for what is needed, and knowing which third-party services see that data, are not formalities for the end of the project. They are decided at the drawing stage.

A website that earns the booking.

My position is simple. Platforms will keep bringing guests, and it makes sense to be on them. But a luxury hotel’s website should not be a brochure with a button that leads somewhere else. It should be the best place to book that hotel: fast on mobile, in the guest’s language and with a clear reason to book there. At this level, that reason is rarely a discount. It is the exact suite, a more flexible cancellation policy, a car waiting at the airport or a table in the restaurant on the first night.

That is what I show with Hôtel Aurenne, a fictional hotel in Gstaad: guests book their room or suite in a window, without leaving the page, and an AI concierge looks after them in six languages, at night too.

The commission is not bad luck. In part, it is the price of a guest who was already on your website and found no reason to stay.

Run this test tonight. Look up your hotel on a platform, choose a room and, before booking, open your own website in another tab. Give yourself a minute. What do you find on your website that was not on the platform? And what was on the platform that your website does not have?

If the second list is longer than the first, you know where the guest goes back to. What remains to be known is how much that costs you each year.

That is the first thing I study in the Strategic Diagnostic, with your website and the platform open side by side.