> The information being referred to here is not scarce, though. >All airlines and hotels and car rental websites show everyone the information, at the cost of a few minutes low effort button clicking. A vast change from how difficult and time consuming it was to access information before the internet.

I think the difference in information is tremendous. getting 100 quotes from hotels from individual hotels websites would take many hours, and is a 5 second operation through booking.

Consider that you might do that several of times in the process of creating a booking, it might represent a dozens of hours of information collection and organization.

organization and accessibility has tremendous value to the customer.