Follow the money: advertising scale shapes hotel visibility
The commercial relationship between Google and the major OTAs is central to understanding the economics surrounding hotel-search visibility.
Large intermediaries invest billions of dollars annually in acquiring traffic. That expenditure does not prove that Google designs organic results to favour those companies. It does demonstrate that OTAs can compete for visibility at a scale beyond the reach of most independent hotels and hotel groups.
What Booking Holdings reports
In 2025, Booking Holdings reported marketing expenditure of $8.19 billion, up 12.5% from $7.28 billion in 2024.
Marketing represented:
- 30.4% of Booking Holdings’ total revenue.
- 4.4% of its total gross bookings.
The company states that performance marketing accounts for a substantial majority of its marketing expenditure. It identifies online search engines—primarily Google—alongside affiliate marketing, metasearch and social media as its principal performance-marketing channels.
This is more informative than describing Google merely as Booking’s “widely understood” principal search partner: Booking Holdings itself identifies Google as its primary search-engine channel.
However, the company does not disclose the precise amount paid to Google. Its $8.19 billion total also includes brand marketing, social media, affiliates, metasearch, television, online video, public relations and sponsorships.
The figure therefore demonstrates Booking’s overall marketing scale—not its exact expenditure on Google Ads or Google Hotel Ads.
Booking also reported that performance-marketing returns declined slightly in 2025 because of changes in paid-traffic mix and increased social-media spending. This indicates that even the largest intermediaries face rising complexity and pressure in acquiring traffic efficiently.
What Expedia Group reports
Expedia Group reported $7.35 billion in direct selling and marketing expenditure in 2025, up from $6.85 billion in 2024.
This figure should not be treated as directly equivalent to Booking Holdings’ marketing expenditure. Expedia’s category includes costs beyond consumer advertising, including B2B partner commissions and other direct selling expenses.
Expedia does not disclose the amount paid specifically to Google.
For that reason, adding Booking’s and Expedia’s reported totals produces an indication of broad commercial scale, but not a reliable estimate of combined advertising expenditure or payments to Google.
External estimates of OTA expenditure on Google
An April 2024 PhocusWire opinion article, citing Statista, estimated that the 11 largest publicly listed online-travel companies spent approximately $8.4 billion on Google advertising in 2023—19% more than in 2022.
The same article estimated that search marketing represented approximately 75% of that expenditure.
These figures provide useful context, but they should be treated cautiously:
- They are external estimates rather than company-reported payments.
- The underlying Statista methodology should be reviewed before publication.
- The companies included in the calculation should be identified.
- “Google advertising” may include products beyond conventional paid Search.
- The estimate should not be presented as an audited industry total.
If the underlying methodology cannot be verified, the figure should remain a secondary contextual reference rather than a central part of the argument.
What hotels spend remains unknown
No comparable aggregate figure is publicly available for the amount spent by independent hotels and hotel groups on Google Ads, Google Hotel Ads and other Google marketing products.
Hotel expenditure is fragmented across:
- Thousands of individual businesses and brands.
- Different destinations and source markets.
- Internal and agency-managed advertising accounts.
- Search, Hotel Ads, metasearch and display campaigns.
- Branded, generic and defensive paid-search activity.
The absence of an aggregate total should be stated clearly rather than replaced with an unsupported estimate.
It also identifies a valuable evidence gap. Hotel associations, booking-engine providers, metasearch specialists and digital agencies could contribute anonymised data showing:
- Paid-search expenditure as a percentage of direct-booking revenue.
- Google Hotel Ads expenditure and return.
- The cost of defending hotel-brand searches.
- The proportion of direct revenue dependent on paid Google traffic.
- Differences between independent hotels, small groups and international chains.
- Changes in acquisition costs following new SERP designs.
Such evidence would help regulators understand whether a remedy shifts visibility towards organisations with the greatest ability to buy traffic.
Why scale matters for the direct channel
Large OTAs can fund campaigns across generic destination searches, hotel-category queries, multiple source markets and individual hotel brands.
Most hotels operate with substantially smaller budgets. Their paid activity is commonly concentrated around:
- Branded searches.
- High-intent destination or property queries.
- Google Hotel Ads.
- Metasearch.
- Protecting demand already generated by the hotel’s name and reputation.
This creates an asymmetry. If a new organic module directs travellers towards intermediary platforms earlier in the journey, those platforms may also be better positioned to reinforce that visibility through paid advertising.
Hotels may then face additional pressure to purchase Google Ads or Google Hotel Ads to recover visibility for demand associated with their own properties and brands.
That outcome is possible, but it has not yet been demonstrated. It should be tested through changes in:
- Branded paid-search costs.
- OTA impression share on hotel-brand queries.
- Free Booking Link visibility.
- Hotel Ads participation and cost.
- Direct-site click-through rates.
- Direct customer-acquisition costs.
- Organic-to-paid traffic mix.
- OTA-versus-direct booking share.
What the expenditure does—and does not—prove
The financial evidence supports three conclusions:
- Major OTAs possess an enormous capacity to acquire traffic.
- Google is an important performance-marketing channel for those companies.
- Hotels do not generally compete with comparable financial resources.
It does not prove that:
- Google designed the Hotel Multi-Pack to reward its largest advertisers.
- Every dollar reported as marketing expenditure was spent on Google.
- Higher advertising expenditure directly determines organic ranking.
- The observed test has already increased hotels’ acquisition costs.
The success of the DMA remedy should therefore not be judged solely by counting the number of third-party platforms displayed.
It should also be judged by whether official hotel websites can compete effectively without being forced to repurchase, through advertising or commission, access to demand generated by their own properties and brands.
