Tourism spending: who really pockets the billions from your holiday?
When you book a summer trip from Belgium, only part of what you pay stays with the hotel, the guide or the family-run gîte. A large slice is captured further up the chain — by online booking platforms, airlines and tour operators.
In 30 seconds
- Online travel platforms typically charge accommodation providers commissions in the range of roughly 15–25%, which is built into the room price you pay.
- Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam, was designated a 'gatekeeper' under the EU Digital Markets Act in 2024, triggering obligations toward hotels.
- Tourism 'leakage' means a substantial share of spending in many destinations flows out to foreign-owned airlines, chains and platforms rather than staying local.
- Budget-airline and package pricing often place the real margin in unbundled extras — seat selection, bags, transfers — rather than the advertised fare.
The RTBF report examines the distribution of tourism revenue — the gap between what travellers pay and what reaches destinations. Key named entities: RTBF (the Belgian French-language public broadcaster, which raised the question); Booking.com and its parent Booking Holdings (Amsterdam-based, the dominant European accommodation platform); the European Commission (which designated Booking.com a Digital Markets Act gatekeeper in 2024); UN Tourism (UNWTO) and the OECD, whose work on tourism 'leakage' frames how spending flows out of local economies. The core mechanism is intermediation: platforms take commission from hosts, airlines monetise unbundled extras, and tour operators keep the margin between supplier cost and retail price.
Background
Online travel agencies transformed holiday booking from the 1990s onward by solving discovery and trust, but consolidation left a handful of platforms — Booking.com foremost in Europe — with market-defining power. Tourism economists have flagged 'leakage' for decades, and regulatory attention intensified with the EU's Digital Markets Act, under which Booking.com was named a gatekeeper in 2024.
What to do
Find your accommodation on a platform if you like, then book it directly; favour independent operators and locally owned restaurants; pay in the local currency to dodge conversion mark-ups; scrutinise flight and package checkouts for unbundled extras; and treat the review-sorted first page as advertising, not a ranking of quality.
Impact
Regional — Belgian hoteliers, especially at the coast and in Brussels, face the same platform commissions as their foreign counterparts, so EU-level DMA enforcement affects Belgian hosts directly as well as Belgian travellers.
EvidenceDeveloping · 1 official document · Background sources: 1 · some details remain unconfirmedExplore evidence →Hide evidence ↑
- Publication date unavailable
- Retrieved by ODIN:
- 5 Aug 2026
- Published:
- 13 May 2024, 02:00
- Retrieved by ODIN:
- 5 Aug 2026
- Publication date unavailable
- Retrieved by ODIN:
- 5 Aug 2026
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This story was assembled from verified evidence, with its sources and reasoning recorded as it was written.