OTA Commission Rates in India (2026): What Every Channel Actually Charges

The short answer: published and reported commission ranges

Read the ranges below for the short answer, then read the rest of this page for the real one. Where a number is officially published, this page says so. Where it is only reported by hoteliers and consultants, it says that too, because the difference matters and nobody else marks it.

The Indian industry body has been blunter than any of these ranges. In its formal complaint against MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India said its members were being charged between 18% and 40%. Hold that number. It is the honest one.

Why the headline rate is a lie of omission

There are six layers stacked on top of the number in your contract, and most hoteliers count one of them.

The one that ruins people is the discount you fund yourself, which is not called a discount. Take Booking.com's Genius programme. Your commission rate does not go up, it stays at 15%, so hoteliers assume it is free visibility. Do the arithmetic. A room listed at ₹6,000, a Genius guest gets 10% off which you fund, so she pays ₹5,400. Booking.com takes 15% of ₹5,400, which is ₹810. You keep ₹4,590 on a ₹6,000 room. That is not a 15% cost. That is a 23.5% cost, and your commission invoice will never say so, because ₹600 of it was called a discount, not commission.

The India-only layer: GST, TDS and TCS

You will see two deductions on your OTA settlements that are not commission. Income tax TDS on e-commerce payouts is currently 0.1% of gross, reduced from 1% with effect from 1 October 2024 and now sitting within Section 393 of the Income-tax Act 2025. GST TCS under Section 52 of the CGST Act is currently 0.5% of net taxable supplies, reduced from 1% with effect from 10 July 2024.

Neither of these is a cost. Both are creditable. GST TCS lands in your electronic cash ledger once the OTA files its GSTR-8, and you set it off against your GST liability. Income tax TDS shows up against your PAN and you claim it when you file. It is your money, parked with the government under your name. The honest sentence is this: TDS and TCS are not a tax on you, they are a refund you probably never claimed. Most small properties never reconcile them, so a fully refundable withholding quietly becomes a permanent loss through pure neglect.

The thing your contract may no longer be allowed to say

On 19 October 2022 the Competition Commission of India fined MakeMyTrip and Goibibo ₹223.48 crore, and OYO ₹168.88 crore, following a complaint originally filed by FHRAI. The CCI found that MMT-Go had imposed wide price parity and room parity clauses: hotels could not sell rooms cheaper on any other OTA or on their own website, and could not withhold rooms from MMT-Go if they were available elsewhere. The Commission held this to be an abuse of dominant position and directed MMT-Go to remove those parity obligations.

The single deepest belief in Indian independent hospitality is that you cannot offer a lower price on your own website than on MakeMyTrip, because parity. The competition regulator looked at that clause, fined the company hundreds of crores, and ordered it removed. I am a founder, not your lawyer, and OTA orders get appealed, so read your current contract and take your own legal advice before you act. But the belief that keeps most Indian hoteliers from ever competing with their own distribution channel is, at minimum, worth re-examining with a professional. What falls out of it: you may be free to be cheaper on your own WhatsApp than on MakeMyTrip, and the only remaining question is whether a guest can actually book and pay you there in under two minutes.

The ten-minute method: compute your own effective rate

Stop reading ranges and compute your number. Pick one OTA and one completed month. Effective OTA cost is (A minus B) divided by A, where A is gross booking value (what guests actually paid for rooms, before taxes) and B is what actually hit your bank for those bookings. Add the refundable TDS (0.1%) and GST TCS (0.5%) back into B if you reclaim them; if you do not reclaim them, leave them out and understand you have chosen to make them a real cost. Then subtract the discounts you funded, Genius, mobile rates and campaigns, because that layer never shows up as commission.

A prediction: on at least one platform your effective rate will start with a 2, and possibly a 3. Not because anyone lied to you, but because nobody ever put the layers on one page. Where to find the raw numbers is below.

What the commission actually buys

I run a company whose purpose is to reduce your dependence on these platforms, so discount what I say next accordingly. OTAs work. They deliver demand you could not buy for the price anywhere else. For a new property with no brand, no reviews and no traffic, an OTA is not a parasite, it is the only affordable customer acquisition channel on earth.

The billboard effect is real: a large share of travellers who discover a property on an OTA then search for it directly before booking, some studies put it around half. So an OTA commission is partly an advertising spend, and part of what it buys is a guest who was going to find you anyway. The correct mental model is not commission is theft, it is commission is customer acquisition cost. And CAC is a perfectly reasonable thing to pay, right up until you are paying it on a guest who already stayed with you last year and already had your WhatsApp number in her phone. That is the failure. Not the 20%. The 20% on a guest who was already yours.

The number that matters is the base, not the rate

Most owners obsess over the commission rate, which they cannot control, and ignore the commission base, which they can. You will not negotiate MakeMyTrip from 25% to 18%, you have no leverage and they know it. But you can move the share of your revenue that goes through them from 65% to 35%, and that is worth ten times more than any rate negotiation.

Two hotels, both doing ₹47 lakh a month in rooms. Hotel A pays an 18% effective rate with 70% of revenue via OTA, so ₹5.92 lakh a month in commission. Hotel B pays a worse 25% rate but only 30% of revenue via OTA, so ₹3.53 lakh a month. Hotel B pays the worse rate and keeps ₹2.4 lakh a month more, nearly ₹29 lakh a year. Hotel B did not win a negotiation, it changed the base. Stop fighting for two points on the rate, go and take twenty points off the base.

Eight levers that actually move the base

Levers 1 to 4 are pure housekeeping and can be done this week. Levers 5 to 7 are the actual business, and they are the ones nobody has time to do by hand.

Where Mehman fits

Levers 5, 6 and 7 are the reason Mehman exists. The AI answers the 11pm WhatsApp in under a minute, in the guest's language, with your real rates and real policies. The booking happens inside that same conversation: availability, quote, deposit, confirmation, no website, no form, no bounce back to MakeMyTrip. Every channel a guest can reach you on lands in one inbox, and every guest merges into one profile, so the family who came last December is recognised in April instead of being quoted like a stranger.

Mehman is built to move revenue off the OTAs and onto your own channel, not to add another commission on top of the one you already pay. We would rather show you what that looks like on your own property than argue it here, so book a demo and we will walk you through what it costs for your size. We also built a free revenue audit that runs this whole calculation on your property and shows you where the leaks are. It is free, it stays free, and we will run it whether or not you ever pay us a rupee.

Sources and methodology

Every figure on this page is either published by the platform, reported by a named third party, or clearly marked as a range. Rates are negotiated per property, so treat every number here as a starting point for checking your own contract, never as a substitute for it.

Booking.com fee structure, Preferred Partner, Genius mechanics and payment processing fees: SiteMinder, Lodgify, Guesty, Houst, your.rentals, Rield (2025 to 2026). MakeMyTrip and Goibibo ranges: White Sky Hotel Consultancy, FHRAI public statements as reported by YourStory, STAAH. Agoda compensation model: Agoda Partner Hub. Billboard effect and general trends: Cloudbeds. GST TCS reduction to 0.5%: CBIC Notification No. 15/2024-Central Tax and No. 01/2024-Integrated Tax, dated 10 July 2024. Income tax TDS reduced to 0.1%: Finance (No. 2) Act 2024, effective 1 October 2024, recodified under Section 393 of the Income-tax Act 2025. CCI order against MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and OYO, 19 October 2022: CCI order in Case No. 14 of 2019, as reported by Khaitan & Co, SCC Online and Lexology.

Nothing on this page is tax or legal advice. Rates and rules change with every Budget and every GST Council meeting. Verify with your CA before you act on any of it. Last verified 15 July 2026.

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