Everything You Wanted to Know About the Hotel Industry's Gripes Against OTAs

The conflict between hospitality brands and the online travel agencies that sell their products is in full bloom as we head into the summer of 2016, and it will only get more ferocious as the year progresses. We said as much in our 2016 Megatrends Forecast magazine earlier this year. Now a European Union Committee has come out with lengthy report on what it calls "Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market", which includes detailed testimonies by various online and digital players across Europe on the pros and cons of going single market for digital businesses across the European Union countries. The report is the end of an "investigation" (read: testimonies) on how the largest online platforms use their market power and whether the current regulatory environment remains "fit for purpose." As part of that, online travel was a key part of this process, and players like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Skyscanner, and British Hospitality Association also testified. One testimony particularly caught our eye: an anonymous testimony, very likely from a hotelier that has business in Europe, on the complaints it has against the big OTAs and online travel players, particularly Priceline Group, Expedia and TripAdvisor. The anonymous declaration accused online travel agencies of adjusting prices based upon users' browsing histories, among other things. As any follower of Google or Microsoft's troubles in Europe would recognize, some of the complaints focused on parts of OTA's businesses that were a direct result of their success at being good at what they do, as opposed to a grand conspiracy.  But it also focused on elements of their business that have long bothered hotel chains, hotel operators, airlines, and others. It is an engrossing read, primarily because in a series of 16 questions and considerations, it lays out a litany of complaints of the detrimental effects (from a European perspective) of too much concentration of power in the hand of online travel booking players. Also, we're slightly biased because it mentions one of our previous stories as evidence as well. We are extracting that anonymous testimony in full. Pour a cup of coffee (or tea) and dive in! Summary and Key Asks: The growth of online platforms, which are now at the heart of modern commerce, should be examined carefully. While they can bring benefits, there are also pitfalls to the emergence of online platforms. Online platforms can rapidly scale. They tend to have small pay