Superficially, but more deeply it's part of the propaganda war the WSJs corporate parent has been carrying out against Google on all fronts for quite a long time, which is in part partisan/ideological, and in part business over similar issues in publishing.
These are clearly hit pieces and as my parent mentioned, part of a coordinated effort to undermine Google. They did the same thing with YouTube. Everyone is worse off because of wsj.
My criteria are all about size and reach. For example I wold consider a flat earth discussion (99% parody, 1% wtf I assume) a waste of HN attention bandwidth.
the percentage of people who take stories at face value is way too high.
i'll keep my words kind and limit this comment to just that....
old: OTA makes a $20 commission on a $100 rate through them
new 1: Google makes an ~$20 commission on a $140 room rate (15%) through Hotel
new 2: Google makes a $17 commission on the $117 room the OTA now has to sell it.
Or the OTA tries to still sell at ~$100 and only makes a $3-$5 commission.
> Google also requires OTAs to give its webcrawlers access to proprietary information including room availability, descriptions, pricing and custom bundles and other data—information that OTAs typically keep closely held from competitors.
Great, the amazon model of "to run on our platform we get all the data of what's profitable for you, how profitable it is, and what buyer interest is, and we then use that to power our competing product which also runs on our platform to take all the profit out of the marketplace and force you out."
Nope this isn't illegal, but again seems like an abuse of position. It's like running a competing restaurant, but also being the city's auditer and gathering all financials as well as the food inspector who is required to inspect (watch) every recipe and dish get made to be able add it to their own menu if it's a hit.
And finally regardless of all of the above, does noone else see it as a problem the general idea of looking for a percentage of revenue of every link a user follows from google? For example next them move into newspapers, and want a percentage of subscription ad-revenue for users forwarded. "Yeah we own adwords, but it's not anti-competitive. You can always run ads on your site and just not be indexed by us. [And not get referral traffic]. If you want us to accurately spider your site and refer to pages, we take a percentage".
So hotels, car rentals, flights, shopping, movie tickets, (and any other search that google productizes)... The end game of this is have any transaction that happens on the web that came from a google referral, they get a cut. It's obviously not there yet, but that's the direction they keep moving: Turn search into an app store / amazon style platform and get 20% of everything on the internet.
Once a company has a monopoly, the rules change.
Apple does pretty much the same thing with its suppliers, no? They even work out what profit and costs a supplier is supposed to have (meaning: if your costs are higher it's the fault of the supplier).
A "others do it too" might not be too good of an argument, but I do wonder why heavily looking into your suppliers (costs, etc) is that bad.
Any move that hurts Booking.com's revenues is a good move, by me.
I don't have an issue with them taking 20% commission, but I loathe all of the dark patterns they employ to make that commission.
I tried to leave a negative review for a hotel on booking.com and the overall result was 3.5 out 5!
At least with google reviews I can get a fair picture of what the place is actually like.
And, all that 'just one room left at this price' is basically fraud.
It does annoy me though when I try to book direct and get charged the exact same price. I know with chains you get loyalty discounts and such but a there are still a lot of independents where you don't.
Do you mean tripadvisor? Booking.com works on a scale of 1-10.
So yeah, seems like OTAs were okay with this as long as it was IHG, Hilton, Marriott, Accor, Choice Hotels and Best Western doing this on their own (or through fairly low-traffic sites like roomkey.com or pointshound.com), but now that Google actively promotes direct bookings, they’re feeling the effect.
I guess I don’t know how agreements work. Seems like OTAs are more flexible with pricing compared to the hotel staff.
For instance a lot of OTA will push non cancellable rooms for lower prices. The hotel probably doesn’t want to deal with these customer issues directly, while the guaranteed benefit is attractive.
Not every OTA is just a proxy. Some maintain their own stock and do forecasting/yield management etc..
I'm fairly certain Google skips all of this, so I would say their profit is effectively (much) higher.
What sucks about the former approach is that booking portals make sort of an exclusive deal, where the price they advertise (with their cut) is as low as a direct sell.
I understand they can't go lower than booking site due to contracts, but it would make sense to offer at least similar rates in order to attract direct bookings.
They'll have done some sort of estimate that the revenue they lose from charging direct bookers lower prices is greater than the revenue they lose from people comparing their price with the OTA price, even if that estimation is on the back of an envelope.
"OTAs earn a roughly 20% commission from hotels for each reservation they book, which covers their cost of marketing, inventory acquisition, customer support and payment processing."
20% is a ton! Later in the editorial, the writers complain about how Google takes "a 10% to 15% commission on net revenues from reservations booked through its meta-search. Google thus gobbles up most of the profits that OTAs earn".
But Google is taking on the marketing! To be fair, inventory acquisition and payments are also costs, but from running travel sites before, travel truly is a marketing game. As a result, their take makes sense given that they're really taking the place of the traditional marketing channel.
Google's concentration of power definitely is concerning. But the OTAs (who have been living off fat profits for years; see Priceline stock [1]) get none of my sympathy.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PCLN/; has outperformed Google stock over the past 10 years