Take Rate
Take Rate is the share of booking value that an online travel platform keeps as its own revenue. Expressed as a percentage of gross booking value, it aggregates everything the platform earns on a transaction — commission, merchant margin, payment and service fees, and increasingly advertising — into a single number that describes how expensive that channel is at portfolio level.
Formula
Take Rate = Platform revenue ÷ Gross Booking Value × 100
Example
A platform books €10bn of GBV in a quarter and recognises €1.4bn of revenue: a 14% take rate. Its mix explains the figure — accommodation sold on the agency model at roughly 15–18% commission, flights at 1–3%, and a growing advertising line that carries no inventory cost at all. If flight volume grows faster than hotels, blended take rate falls even though hotel commission is unchanged. Conversely, a shift toward merchant model inventory bought at a wholesale / net rate and resold at retail typically raises it.
Why it matters
Take rate is the single clearest read on the balance of power between platforms and suppliers, and it moves for reasons hotels feel directly. Rising take rate usually means more paid-visibility mechanics — preferred partner programs, visibility boosters, sponsored placement — layered on top of base commission, so the effective cost of a channel drifts above its headline rate. For a hotelier, the platform's blended take rate is the mirror image of their own cost of distribution: what the OTA reports as margin expansion appears on the P&L as commission and fees.
Take rate is also the metric regulators and investors watch when arguing about platform market power. Much of the DMA debate and the wide parity ban rests on whether suppliers can realistically discipline take rate by steering demand elsewhere.
Caveats
Blended take rate hides everything interesting. A platform-wide 14% can contain 20%+ on accommodation and near-zero on flights, so comparing headline take rates across platforms with different category mixes is meaningless without the breakdown. Advertising revenue also inflates take rate without being a per-booking cost to any one supplier.
Related
- GBV (Gross Booking Value) — the denominator
- Commission Override — the supplier-side lever that raises effective take rate
- Net ADR Yield — the same economics measured on a single booking