Mirai, the provider of technology and operations support to help hotels sell in the direct channel, has today unveiled new findings on the impact of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) on the direct sale of hotel reservations within the European Union (EU) when compared with non-EU markets.

Mirai’s latest analysis reveals that the DMA has led to Google suffering an overall 1% decline in its market share of all direct hotel bookings within the EU, marking a significant shift in how users interact with hotels via Google platforms.

However more importantly the study – leveraging Google Analytics 4 data-driven attribution model – found that specifically Google Hotels’ share of direct bookings plummeted from 13.4% to 8.9% within the EU, a 4.5 percentage points decrease.

Nonetheless, Google managed to recapture 82% of that loss through other Google placements such as Google Ads and organic search where it saw a 1.5 and 2 percentage points increase in the overall share of direct bookings for hotels within the EU.

Based on an extended analysis timeframe—spanning 8 months before and after the DMA took effect on January 19, 2024— the study covers more than 3,000 hotels worldwide and offers an in-depth look into how the DMA is reshaping hotel distribution across Europe.

Meanwhile outside of Europe, Mirai’s research shows a quite different trend. Although Google Hotel Ads experienced a slight decrease, it’s starting point was higher (16.8%) and the decline less (down 1.1 percentage point to 15.7%), meaning it remains a vital source of direct bookings. At the same time paid traffic surged by 20%, now accounting for 12.7% of total bookings, though this was offset by a decline in organic traffic, leading to increased distribution costs for hotels in these regions as well.

“The Digital Markets Act was designed to increase competition but whilst it reduced Google’s overall share by 1% of direct hotel bookings it has unintentionally increased its influence in both organic and paid, thus arguably increasing the cost of direct distribution for hoteliers” said Javier Delgado, CEO at Mirai. “The study additionally found that within the EU the overall share that other meta search engines have a direct hotel bookings actually increased, but by just 0.2 percentage points. So hoteliers shouldn’t give up on other meta search websites yet as a source of modest, but potentially important, bookings.”

The DMA’s long-term effects are still unfolding. With Booking.com now required to comply with the new regulations, including the recent removal of the parity clause in EU markets, significant changes in the distribution landscape are anticipated in the coming months.