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A comment on Google works with hotels to hurt travel competition. Parent comment

Re:Google works with hotels to hurt travel competition by jpalomaki on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:05AM (#16021229)
What I find interesting is that I've seen cases where you don't even find a matching price from the hotels own booking system.

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.

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Re:Google works with hotels to hurt travel competition by notahacker on Thursday December 28, 2017 @07:23AM (#16021651)
They'll pick up direct bookings from people who aren't interested in price comparisons and "special offer, only three rooms left, no refund" though. Same as few service providers choose to match their Groupon price on their own website.

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.

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