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That's because the terms of use of bookings.com insist that you can't offer a price lower than on booking.com.

I don't even if this is legal in your country, but in Germany they ruled against it: https://www.thelocal.de/20210518/germany-upholds-ban-on-book...

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100% wrong. You can't advertise a lower price - for obvious reasons, but you can of course give a lower price to people who call, email or walk in.

Many hotels are idiotic about this and will put a cheaper price on booking, then wonder why booking is taking all their reservations. Unexplainable...

Beyond the TOS nobody reads (not even sellers), this sort of difference might be due to a number of factors. It could well be that they provide rooms discounted to Booking.com because they want to fill a certain amount no matter what, and then do price-anchoring for other rooms on their website. This is more or less like them giving rooms massively discounted to package sellers (Thomas Cook etc).

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