In 2025, Swiss hospitality counted more overnight stays than ever before: 43.9 million, 2.6 percent more than the previous year. A record — and yet in initial conversations you hear the same sentence more and more often: «The house is full, but too little is left at the bottom.» Both are true at the same time. And a good part of the reason lies exactly where marketing decides: at the channel through which the booking comes in.
The problem in everyday hotel business
Occupancy is visible. It appears in the system every morning, it can be compared with the previous year, it comes up in every meeting. The margin of an individual booking is not. What a room earns via Booking.com and what the same room earns via your own website does not appear side by side in any dashboard — even though, at an identical price, it is a markedly different amount.
A second blind spot comes on top of that: when people talk about direct bookings, they usually only calculate the commission saved. What the direct booking itself cost — website, booking engine, advertising, working time — rarely shows up in the same calculation. The result is a comparison in which one side bears all the costs and the other bears none.
Current state of earnings
The figures paint a clear picture. The Federal Statistical Office reports 43.9 million overnight stays for 2025, the highest figure ever recorded. Occupancy stood at 51.1 percent. For summer 2026, the KOF at ETH Zurich expects 24.8 million overnight stays, down from 25.2 million the previous year — a drop of 1.6 percent, driven mainly by weaker Asian source markets. Switzerland Tourism expects 0.7 percent fewer overnight stays for the full year 2026 compared with 2025.
Prof. Dr. Jean-Philippe Weisskopf of the EHL Hospitality Business School sums up the consequence in one sentence: «Occupancy is visible, profitability has to be managed.» Revenue management, he argues, must evolve into profit management — the question is no longer how to fill the house, but which guests, through which channels, ultimately contribute the most to the bottom line. He explicitly names distribution costs as an item that is regularly underestimated.
How the channels are distributed today
The European hotel distribution study by HOTREC and the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais provides the order of magnitude. For the reference year 2023, surveyed across more than 3,000 hotels, 29.6 percent of all overnight stays in Europe ran through booking portals. Within these portals, Booking Holdings holds 71.0 percent — up from 60.0 percent in 2013. Across Europe, 13.4 percent were booked in real time via the hotel's own website, an increase of 74 percent compared with 2013. Email, at 15.5 percent, remains a bigger direct channel than the hotel's own booking engine.
So the direction is right — the hotel's own channel is growing. It is just growing from a small base, while dependence on a single provider keeps increasing.
What does this mean for your hotel?
1. Determine two figures, not one
The first is quickly found: commission per booking, in francs, not in percent. The second is the uncomfortable one: what does a direct booking cost? All marketing expenses of a quarter — advertising, website, booking engine, agency — divided by the number of direct bookings in the same period. Only once both figures are on the table does «more direct bookings» become a strategy rather than a slogan.
2. Calculate the comparison honestly
If the direct booking comes in at 40 francs in acquisition costs and the portal booking at 95 francs in commission, the case is clear. If it comes in at 110 francs, it is equally clear — just the other way round. Both outcomes occur in practice, and both are useful. What is not useful is not knowing the figure at all.
3. Do not aim for one hundred percent direct
Portals deliver reach that no single hotel can generate on its own — especially in markets where you are not known. The goal, therefore, is not a maximum direct share, but a deliberate mix: which share through which channel, at which times, in which markets? Those who buy reach in the low season and favour their own channel in the high season are steering. Those who accept the same distribution year-round are being steered.
4. Review weekly, not annually
Looking at the income statement once a month comes too late for these decisions. Direct booking share and cost per booking by channel belong on the same page as occupancy — and on a weekly basis. This is not a question of expensive tools, but a question of habit.
Common mistakes
- Treating commission as the only distribution cost item and ignoring your own acquisition costs
- Setting the direct booking share as a goal without knowing the costs behind it
- Assessing rate parity requirements and portal visibility in isolation, instead of as part of the same calculation
- Cutting the marketing budget first when demand weakens — exactly the channel that leaves more per booking
Conclusion
Record demand does not solve a margin problem, it conceals it. If demand slightly declines in 2026, as the KOF and Switzerland Tourism expect, it will no longer be the number of bookings that decides, but their composition. The lever for this does not lie at the front desk, but in marketing — and it begins with two figures that most hotels do not know today.
Sources
- Federal Statistical Office: In 2025, Swiss hospitality recorded almost 44 million overnight stays
- KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, May 2026: Swiss summer tourism weaker
- Hotel Inside, 16 September 2026: Full beds, empty margins — interview with Prof. Dr. Jean-Philippe Weisskopf, EHL
- HOTREC Hospitality Europe and University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais, reference year 2023: European Hotel Distribution Study
- htr hotelrevue: Hot summer supports Swiss tourism
More related articles
- Tourismusconsult: Online marketing for hotels: which channels will really pay off in 2026 — and what they are allowed to cost
- Tourismusconsult: The 5 most important KPIs in hotel marketing (and how to measure them without expensive tools)
- Tourismusconsult: Marketing budget 2027: why hotels should approach their planning differently now
- Tourismusconsult: Rate parity in Switzerland and what it means for direct bookings
