Europe Fined Google for Favoring Its Hotel Search. Hotels May Not Be the Winners

By HNR News Staff Reporter

The European Commission fined Google €460 million on Thursday for giving its own services greater prominence in search results than competing offerings. But in the fight over hotel search, one group risks being lost between the platform and its rivals: the hotels themselves.

The search penalty was part of an €890 million action against Google under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. The Commission imposed a separate €430 million fine over restrictions that prevented Google Play developers from freely directing customers to alternative purchasing channels.

For search, the Commission found that Google favored its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results. Those services could appear at the top of a results page with richer visuals, specialized filters and other features unavailable to comparable third-party services.

“Gatekeepers must not treat their own services more favourably in ranking than third-party services,” the Commission said in its announcement.

The principle is straightforward: Google should not be able to use its control of general search to steer people toward another Google product.

The practical consequences are considerably messier.

In hotel search, Google is not merely choosing between its own service and a rival offering the same product. It sits between travelers, individual hotels and intermediaries such as online travel agencies and comparison services. A change intended to give those intermediaries more visibility does not necessarily give hotels more opportunity to reach guests.

It may do the opposite.

Google says earlier changes made to comply with the Digital Markets Act increased traffic to a small number of intermediary services while reducing engagement with hotels and other businesses. In 2024, the company said direct-booking clicks to hotels had fallen by as much as 30 percent following its initial European redesign.

Those numbers come from Google, an interested party with every reason to portray the regulation unfavorably. But hotel operators have raised similar concerns.

The German Hotel Association has warned that removing Google’s hotel features—including maps, price comparisons and direct-booking links—could make independent properties less visible. The association argues that the resulting traffic would be captured principally by large booking platforms, increasing hotels’ dependence on companies that charge commissions for reservations.

“The recent changes in Google Search have already led to a reduction in traffic and thus opportunities for direct bookings,” the association said during an earlier Google test.

That is the central complication in the Commission’s case. The immediate rivals to Google’s specialized hotel results are largely comparison and booking services. The underlying hotels are suppliers whose rooms appear across all those services—and which often prefer customers to book directly.

Sending a traveler from Google to a comparison site before the traveler reaches a hotel may increase competition at one layer of the market. It can also add another toll collector to the transaction.

Google tested a more drastic version of that outcome in Germany, Belgium and Estonia in late 2024. For a small group of users, it removed hotel-specific search features and returned to a page dominated by conventional links.

According to results published by Google, users took longer to find hotels and were more likely to abandon their searches. Traffic to hotels fell by more than 10 percent, while traffic to intermediary sites remained largely flat. Google ended the experiment.

The company has not published enough methodological detail for those figures to be treated as an independent assessment. The test nevertheless complicates the assumption that removing Google’s specialized results automatically transfers traffic to either its rivals or hotels.

Google has responded to Thursday’s decision by arguing that the EU is forcing it to degrade its products.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, called the decision “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants.” He said compliance would require Google to remove real-time information valued by European users, including instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights and restaurants, according to the Associated Press.

Google’s argument should not be accepted uncritically. The company designed search results in which it controlled the page, the ranking and the specialized service receiving premium placement. A useful feature can still be anticompetitive when its owner denies comparable treatment to rivals.

Nor does evidence that hotels benefited from Google’s design prove that the design was fair. Google could simultaneously help hotels reach customers and use its control of search to disadvantage competing services.

But the hotel example exposes a weakness in treating every dispute over search prominence as a simple contest between a gatekeeper and businesses excluded from its page.

Comparison sites are not merely neutral alternatives to Google. They are powerful intermediaries with their own commercial interests. Booking platforms can charge hotels substantial commissions, control their visibility and put distance between a property and its customer. A remedy that transfers power from Google to those platforms may change the identity of the gatekeeper without necessarily improving the hotel’s position.

The Commission’s decision establishes what Google did wrong: it gave its own services privileged treatment on a search engine through which much of the internet is reached. The harder question is what a successful remedy looks like.

If success is measured only by the visibility or traffic received by comparison services, regulators may overlook who pays for that traffic and who controls the eventual customer relationship. Independent hotels could emerge with fewer direct bookings and greater dependence on another set of dominant platforms.

Europe’s case against Google may be legally sound while its remedy produces uneven winners. The hotel was never the principal rival Brussels set out to elevate. It may still be the business that absorbs the cost.