Did you read, or was even aware of, a ToS of a hotel on use of personal data? This is entering the "local planning department in Alpha Centauri" territory.

As a regular person, you should not need to be aware of such things. What GDPR tries to do is to restore some sane defaults into the process, just like customer protection laws do.

This quote seems apropos:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” --Upton Sinclair

Yes, I generally check ToS of whatever services I use, including hotels. And no, it's no "local planning department of Alpha Centauri" territory, it's available on their webpage and in paper form at the reception, usually framed and hanging on the wall. I check it to see what happens if I overstay, but skim through the whole thing.

As a regular person, if I want to use a service offered by someone, I should at least look into their terms - even with GDPR in place.

I'm not saying I disagree with you - but that's an opinion; on the other hand you said that consent was not given, which is simply not true - consent has a definition and that definition was fulfilled, the law doesn't treat ignorant people differently. If you want to say "I don't think <something> should be enough expression of consent", that's OK, say it - but don't lie.

Fair enough. I do read the regular ToS of the hotel that they frame and hang on the wall; it's usually standard stuff and not once I remember reading anything there about use of my data. It's just the usual "hotel night is from X to Y, please don't do <list of ridiculous stuff that some people apparently do in hotels>". So from your comment I assumed that there must be an extra ToS that covers use of personal data. If there is, I've never noticed it.

I don't think there are many hotels handling your personal data except for legal purposes, so they mostly don't need any data policy. So far I've encountered one that simply said that data might be shared with other branches of their company, which I'm happy about.

It sounds like you agree that forcing people to read and agree to individual portions of the ToS is not a downside of GDPR, since we should all be doing that anyway.

I don't agree nor disagree. The comment I replied to was talking about the past, and in the past, the laws were different and consent was given according to them. I deliberately didn't say if I support GDPR or not, it doesn't matter; the comment said "without your consent" which is simply not true.

Freely given consent, as per the GDPR, must be explicit and optional (even if you have consent to use the data for the service being performed). A line buried in a ToS does not comply.

That's today, I replied to a comment talking about the GDPR-less past.

My point is that you can simply change the previous comment to read:

"And then, without your freely given consent, without even notifying you they sold this information to credit score companies, to advertising companies and to whoever the fuck will buy it."

And the point still applies.

No, the original point doesn't apply. Your edits make it completely different, so of course my reaction would be nonsense. "Consent" is a well defined word, and its meaning was fulfilled in the examples the comment listed - of course that would be different today.