Expedia Tells Hotels Adding Resort Fees Will Lower Your Listings on Its Pages
Photo Credit: Expedia Group's Cyril Ranque spoke about the company's new action against hotel resort fees at the Expedia Explore '19 partner conference in Las Vegas November 14, 2019. Expedia Group
Skift Take
Expedia Group's stance on resort fees could have been drafted by a United Nations diplomat. Expedia doesn't want to alienate hotels and seeks to pick up market share based on Booking Holdings' more forceful position. But it's hitting resort-fee-charging hotels right where it hurts — in the prominence of their listings.
As promised a few months ago, Expedia Group began this week to send hotel listings lower in the sort order on its Expedia.com and Hotels.com pages when properties add resort fees to base room rates.
Speaking at a lodging breakout session on stage at the Expedia Explore '19 conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Cyril Ranque, president of the company's newly created Travel Partners Group, said Expedia wanted to take action on resort fees for transparency's sake while also showing respect for hotel partners.
All things being equal, hotel listings would appear lower in the rankings on Expedia's pages when they add nightly resort fees to room rates. Expedia's algorithms, which determine where a hotel listing shows up on its pages, never took that into account before.
However, Ranque said, resort fees are just one consideration when determining how high or low a hotel listing appears on Expedia.com and Hotels.com. Expedia also takes other factors, including the room rate, the quality
