I was pretty frustrated recently when I got a flight for 20% less by clicking through from a Google Flights link than I did from searching directly on aircanada.com while logged in with my Aeroplan account. I know exactly why it's the way it is, but it's pretty discouraging to feel that loyal-customer behaviour like going directly to the airline instead of an aggregator is punished with a higher price.
Almost always, if you walk up to the front desk and ask for a room, the price is 15-20% more than what you see online at that very moment.
This is baffling, and has to be coming from some convoluted agreement.
The hotel makes a lower amount if I book through priceline or expedia or whatever.
The hotels hate expedia but they can't opt out of it so they just degrade the product that is offered at expedia's discount rate -- and they degrade it in a way that expedia can't force them to stop (room assignment is always done at checkin).
I'd argue that's the root of the problem here.
Airlines could solve that problem themselves. And will the instant it’s actually worth it to them.
Airlines are being pressured to change the way they do their differential pricing, but the old system wasn’t some gold star land of virtue method either.
Usually it is done on GDS, which take their cut for each search. And those searches are frequently done on systems can remember 60s when they were created.