Indian hotels paid an estimated ₹8,400 crore in OTA commissions in 2025. Most owners know the number is high. Very few have a plan to change it.
Let's use real numbers. A 40-room hotel in Rishikesh running at 68% average occupancy with an ADR of ₹4,500 does roughly ₹45L in room revenue per month — ₹5.4 crore per year.
If 70% of that comes through OTAs at an average 18% commission, you're paying ₹6.8 crore a year in platform fees. Every year. Without fail. Whether the season is strong or weak.
That ₹6.8 crore isn't marketing spend. It's not creating awareness, building your brand, or growing your repeat guest base. It's the cost of using someone else's demand engine instead of building your own.
The number is even harder to stomach when you consider that most OTA bookings are from guests who would have found your property anyway — because they were specifically searching your destination, your area, your type of stay. You're paying 18% to a platform to introduce you to a guest who was already looking for you.
The most common objection to reducing OTA dependency is: "We need the volume. Without MakeMyTrip, our occupancy drops."
This is partly true and mostly an excuse to avoid doing the harder work.
OTAs do provide discovery — especially for new properties, in new markets, or for guests who have never heard of you. That's legitimate. Where hoteliers make a mistake is treating OTA volume as a ceiling they can't grow beyond, rather than a floor they should be building above.
Hotels that have successfully reduced OTA dependency didn't do it by pulling off OTAs. They did it by making their direct channel good enough to compete — better booking experience, better rate visibility, better trust signals, and better post-stay follow-up.
Going back to our 40-room example: currently 70% OTA, 30% direct. If you shift 20 percentage points — so 50% OTA, 50% direct — here's what changes:
₹22.8L per year. That's a renovation budget. A second revenue manager. A marketing spend. Or simply stronger margins on every room you already fill.
The shift doesn't happen overnight. Properties that do it well take 12–24 months to meaningfully move the ratio. But the compounding effect is real — every direct guest who comes back directly the second time is pure margin improvement.
Most hotels try to push direct bookings without having the foundations in place. Then they give up because "direct doesn't work for us." Here's what actually needs to be in place:
If your direct booking page is slow, ugly, or only accepts bank transfer, guests will go back to Booking.com. Your direct booking experience has to be at least as good as an OTA — ideally better. That means fast mobile checkout, UPI and card support, GST-compliant confirmation emails, and a clear best-rate guarantee.
If guests can book cheaper on MakeMyTrip than on your own website, they will. Rate parity — or a small direct discount — is non-negotiable. Many hotels unknowingly violate their own direct rate by leaving old promotional rates active on OTAs.
This is the part most hoteliers skip. If no one visits your website, your booking engine doesn't matter. You need SEO-optimised property pages that rank for destination searches, a Google Hotel Ads presence so your direct rate shows up alongside OTA listings, and ideally a demand generation layer that surfaces your property to high-intent travellers before they reach an OTA.
The good news: you don't have to change everything at once. A phased approach works better and carries less risk.
None of these steps require you to pull off OTAs. All of them compound over time. The hotel that starts this process today will have a fundamentally different cost structure in three years than the one that keeps doing what it's doing.
The question is not whether this is possible. Hundreds of Indian hotels have done it. The question is when you decide to start.
Use the ROI calculator on our homepage or book a session — we'll model it for your specific property.
