GBV (Gross Booking Value)
GBV (Gross Booking Value) is the total value of all travel booked through a platform in a period, measured at the price the traveller pays, before the platform deducts its own commission, margin, or fees. It is the headline volume metric of the OTA sector: Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Airbnb and Trip.com all report it, and it is the number against which their revenue, marketing spend, and growth are usually benchmarked. GBV counts the whole transaction — room, taxes, fees, and in most definitions ancillaries booked in the same basket — regardless of how little of it the platform keeps.
Formula
GBV = Σ (booking value of all confirmed bookings in the period)
Reporting conventions differ. Most OTAs book GBV at the time of booking, not at the time of stay, and most report gross of cancellations — meaning a booking made in Q1 for a June stay lands in Q1 GBV even if it is later cancelled. Some platforms publish a net or "stayed" figure alongside it.
Example
An OTA reports €10bn of GBV in a quarter. Of that, it recognises €1.5bn as revenue — a 15% take rate — from commissions on agency model bookings, margin on merchant model bookings, and advertising. The remaining €8.5bn flows to hotels, airlines and other suppliers. A platform can therefore grow GBV strongly while revenue stagnates, if mix shifts toward lower-margin business such as flights or wholesale / net rate inventory.
Why it matters
For hoteliers, GBV explains why OTA scale and hotel economics are not the same conversation. A platform optimising GBV growth wants volume and basket size; the hotel on the other side of that booking is optimising net ADR yield. The two diverge whenever the platform pushes discounted or packaged rates that raise booked value while lowering what reaches the property. GBV is also the denominator that makes OTA disclosures comparable: take rate, marketing spend as a share of bookings, and cancellation rates are all expressed against it, so knowing how a given platform defines GBV is a prerequisite for reading its numbers at all.
Caveats
GBV is not revenue and should never be compared with a hotel's own room revenue line. Because it is usually gross of cancellations, a period of elevated cancellation rate or wash can leave reported GBV materially above the value actually consumed.
Related
- Take Rate — the share of GBV a platform converts into revenue
- Merchant Model and Agency Model — the two ways GBV becomes revenue
- Cost of Distribution — the same flow of money viewed from the hotel side