Photograph: Onyango George / EA Hospitality Pulse

East Africa spent 2026 adding charges to the room. A platform has started taking a cut of them.

By Onyango George (OG)

Booking.com has moved government taxes into the base on which it calculates commission. The Caribbean has spent six months fighting it and won carve-outs for others. East Africa, which has layered more levies onto the room this year than any region on the continent, has not asked a single question.

On 28 October, in Kingston, O'Brian Heron sat down across a table from representatives of the company that sells more hotel rooms than any other on earth, to argue about money that was never his. Heron is president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, and his members had been told that from 17 November, new bookings on Booking.com would carry commission calculated not on the room rate but on the room rate plus Jamaica's General Consumption Tax. The company left the meeting promising a formal follow-up. Heron left it with a sentence that is worth reading twice by anyone running a lodge in the Mara or a beach property in Nungwi.

"These taxes are collected from guests on behalf of the Government of Jamaica and remitted to the Government," he said.

That is the whole argument in one line, and it is not a Caribbean argument. Booking.com updated its General Delivery Terms earlier this year to add VAT, GST and other government-imposed taxes to the base used for commission calculation. The company describes the change as a global standardisation of how it works out what it is owed. It took effect in certain destinations on 15 May. Hotels in Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda were told it reaches their new bookings on 17 November. The Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association, which represents 32 national hotel and tourism associations, has been fighting it since May and has now reaffirmed its opposition in writing, in public, and through tourism ministers.

Nobody in East Africa has asked whether it applies here.

Start with the arithmetic, because it is the part that does not depend on anyone's goodwill. Sanovnik Destang, CHTA's president, uses a worked example: a 15 per cent commission on a room rate carrying a 12 per cent government tax produces an effective commission of 16.8 per cent of pre-tax room revenue. The headline rate on the contract does not move. Heron's version, on Jamaica's 10 per cent GCT, takes a 15 per cent commission to 16.5 per cent: on a US$100 room, US$16.50 instead of US$15.00. "Applying a commission to those funds raises the cost of distribution while hotel earnings remain unchanged," Destang said.

Now run the same sum on East African numbers. Kenya's standard VAT rate is 16 per cent. Mainland Tanzania's is 18 per cent. A 15 per cent commission on a Kenyan room becomes 17.4 per cent of pre-tax room revenue, and on a Tanzanian one 17.7 per cent. That is our arithmetic, not anyone's published figure, and it is the only calculation in this piece that matters: East Africa's uplift is roughly 2.4 to 2.7 percentage points of pre-tax room revenue, against the Caribbean's 1.5 to 1.8. The region fighting this hardest is the region with the least to lose from it. On a room quoted at KSh 20,000, the VAT is KSh 3,200, and 15 per cent of that VAT is KSh 480 a night, charged on money the operator is holding for the Kenya Revenue Authority.

Destang made the forward-looking point at a news conference in St John's in May, and it is the one that should alarm East Africa most. If a government raised VAT from 10 per cent to 20 per cent, he warned, the platform would collect more commission on that increase. Read that against what East African governments have actually done this year. Tanzania introduced a US$44 per-visitor inbound insurance charge under Government Notice No. 256 of 4 September. Kenya's equivalent US$44 charge survived a High Court challenge on 7 October, when Justice Olel upheld Gazette Notice 11492. Zanzibar's Revenue Authority levies an infrastructure tax on hotel guests of between US$1 and US$5 per person per day, banded by star rating, under the Infrastructure Tax 2015 as consolidated in 2025. Nairobi City County's Finance Act 2026 added a tourism levy schedule in August. Kampala has charged a local hotel tax assessed on room occupants since 2017. Kenya's Tourism Fund takes 2 per cent of gross sales from regulated establishments and spent this year trying to extend that to accommodation sold through Airbnb and Booking.com itself.

Every one of those is a charge on the act of sleeping in an East African bed. Under the logic of the amended terms, every percentage charge inside the amount a guest pays becomes commissionable, and so does every fixed charge an operator folds into the rate it loads onto the platform. The 2 per cent tourism levy is commissionable whether it appears as a line on the guest's bill or is quietly absorbed into the rate, because either way it sits inside the number the platform sees.

This is where the region's own best practice turns against it. The standing advice, including the advice this publication has given repeatedly, has been to quote all in: to put park fees, levies and the mandatory insurance gates into the headline number rather than springing them on a guest at check-in, because a surprise at the front desk costs more than a higher quote ever did. That advice remains right about the guest. It is now expensive about the platform. An operator who bundles a US$44 insurance charge and a US$5 nightly infrastructure tax into the rate loaded onto Booking.com has, on these terms, made both of them commissionable. An operator who collects them at the property has not, and has instead reintroduced exactly the front-desk argument the all-in advice existed to prevent. There is no clean answer to that, only a decision, and almost nobody in the region has made it deliberately.

The cash mechanics sharpen it further. Booking Holdings now collects the guest's payment itself on 73 per cent of its sales by value, up from 69 per cent a year earlier and around a quarter in 2019, a shift traced in detail by Markus Busch, editor of hospitality.today, in an analysis published on 21 October. Where the platform collects, it nets its commission before remitting to the hotel. The practical consequence is that an East African operator remits the full 16 or 18 per cent VAT to the revenue authority out of a receipt from which the platform has already deducted commission on that same VAT. The hotel is not merely paying more. It is funding a government's tax receipt out of a net payment it never fully received. Heron's second objection at the Kingston meeting was procedural and just as pointed: he objected to continued use of the platform being treated as acceptance of terms his members had not yet been shown.

Which brings us to the only genuinely useful thing in this story, and it is not the grievance. It is the carve-out list. Per CHTA's own review of the published terms, government taxes are excluded from the commission base in the United States, with additional exclusions in Dubai and Egypt. They are included in the United Kingdom. Destination fees were carved out globally in 2019, and CHTA takes credit for that one. In other words, this is not a technical constant. It is a negotiated variable, and the places where it has been negotiated are places with either regulatory weight or an association that showed up. Dubai and Egypt are not large by room count against Europe. They asked.

East Africa has the institutions to ask. The Kenya Association of Hotelkeepers and Caterers, the Hotel Association of Tanzania, Uganda's and Rwanda's equivalents, and above them the East African Community, which renewed its single-destination brand for another decade in October. The region has demonstrated it can act collectively when it wants to: the visa argument, the classification review, the shared brand. What it has never done is open a file on distribution terms. No statement from any East African hotel or tourism association on commission-on-tax could be found in this research, from any of the five markets, at any point since the terms changed in May.

Two honest limits sit on all of this, and they matter. The first is that we could not establish whether Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Uganda or Rwanda fall inside the 15 May tranche, a later one, or a market-specific exclusion. The destination-by-destination terms are published to partners rather than openly, and the company's own characterisation of the change as a global standardisation cuts both ways: it implies the default is inclusion, and it is also a phrase a company uses when it intends to arrive everywhere eventually. The second is that nothing here establishes how much of East African accommodation revenue actually flows through Booking.com. The HOTREC European Hotel Distribution Study puts online travel agencies at 29.9 per cent of European hotel bookings in 2025, with Booking Holdings at 68.8 per cent of that agency channel and Booking.com alone at 66.1 per cent. Those are European shares. No equivalent measurement exists for East Africa, which is a measurement gap this publication has written about before and which here means the size of the exposure cannot be stated, only its direction.

Reginald MacLean, who runs Blue Waters Inn in Tobago and presides over the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association, framed the response in terms East African operators would recognise. He called for "a major push back to Booking.com", and argued that commission should sit below the accommodation tax and the service charge rather than ride on top of them. Barbados went further than complaint. Ian Goodling-Edghill, its tourism minister, said his government was examining whether the policy conforms to Barbadian tax law. Vanessa Ledesma, CHTA's chief executive, kept the register commercial: "The Caribbean has been a committed and contributing partner in Booking.com's regional growth," she said, before adding that "we are asking Booking.com to reconsider this policy."

That is what a region looks like when it treats distribution terms as policy rather than plumbing. CHTA is now reviewing legal and tax frameworks across its member states and evaluating legislative protections for governments to consider, which is the serious move: a statute that prohibits intermediaries from charging commission on amounts held in trust for the state is a far more durable answer than a letter.

Three things follow for an East African operator this week, and none of them require waiting for anyone. Read the commission clause in the actual contract, not the rate-card summary, and establish whether the base is the room rate or the amount paid, because that single line now moves two and a half points of revenue. Decide, in writing, which statutory charges go inside the platform rate and which are collected at the property, and price the trade-off between a commissionable bundle and a front-desk conversation rather than drifting into one by default. And put the question to the association, in writing, because a carve-out is a thing that gets granted to regions that ask and does not get granted to regions that do not.

The Caribbean has spent six months and a great deal of political capital establishing that the money a hotel holds for a government is not the hotel's revenue. East Africa has spent the same six months adding to the amount of money its hotels hold for governments. Only one of those regions has read the terms.