Airbnb guests freed from chores involving ‘significant effort’ under new global rules
Accommodation platform acts after long-standing guest complaints over doing dishes, taking out rubbish and stripping beds
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Booking Holdings has launched Vayo, a personal AI travel service, with plans to invest $100 million in the business. The Seattle-based company opened a waitlist for its free, invite-only private beta on October 14…
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1.1 million hotel-branded ads linked to ‘predatory OTAs’ in a single month
The run of bad press for artificial intelligence (AI) continues, and this time it’s the turn of “predatory” online travel agencies (OTAs). These are the websites that look like a legitimate hotel website but are far from the real deal…
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Booking.com says Europe's hotels don't depend on it
Booking.com's head of public affairs calls Europe's hotel distribution balanced, two weeks after an EU court upheld that Booking dominates online hotel sales
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Booking Holdings and Expedia Group Control 85% of European OTA Market, Study Finds
HOTREC’s 2026 European Hotel Distribution Study reports that Booking Holdings and Expedia Group now account for over 85% of online travel agency (OTA) bookings in Europe, highlighting increasing market concentration and raising concerns over…
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Google Warns EU Regulations Will Reduce Search Quality
Google on Tuesday rolled out changes to its online search resultsin Europe to satisfy European Union (EU) antitrust regulators, but said the change will degrade user experiences that could cost businesses in time and money…
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Google’s Agentic Hotel Booking Push Raises New Questions for Direct Distribution and Guest Ownership
Google has moved another step closer to turning conversational hotel search into an actual booking channel. The company recently confirmed that it has begun a limited U.S…
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Expedia Boosts Its Full-Year Sales Outlook on Strong Bookings
Expedia Group Inc. raised its annual sales forecast, signaling that consumers aren’t being deterred by higher hotel prices and airfare.
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Travel agencies grew hotel bookings twice as fast as the OTAs
Commissionable room nights rose 11.8% in the first half. The commission per night rose 0.8% — everywhere else in distribution, growth is the thing that gets repriced
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Why Hotel Distribution Is Still Broken, And What Comes Next
A couple of Saturdays back, a supplier asked us to block a user: 3,000-plus searches on one property, one set of dates, in 40 minutes. Normally that's fraud. It wasn't. It was an AI agent, a model wired to a headless browser…
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Trip.com Fined in China Antitrust Case as Price Wars Continue
China’s months-long antitrust probe into Trip.com Group Ltd. ended with a multi-billion-yuan penalty on the nation’s largest online travel agency, but the action does little to ease the fierce price wars gripping the domestic hotel sector…
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Booking is copying Expedia's most durable asset
The company is folding Booking.com, Agoda, and Priceline into one B2B entity run by Agoda's CEO — a bet that the most valuable OTA business is the one hotels never see
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Airbnb vs hotels: the latest industry comparison
Hotels continue to hold the strongest position in global accommodation, with most travellers still preferring traditional hotel stays for their consistency, services and reliability.
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EU pushes for unified reporting in short-term rental sector
The reforms target a rapidly growing European short-term rental sector where differing national rules have made cross-border data comparison and market assessment difficult.
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Direct Booking Hotels: Why Market Share Battles Mask Economic Wins
After a decade-long campaign for direct bookings, major hotel chains have secured better economics and lower commissions despite OTAs maintaining market dominance in 2026.
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Google just filed lodging under the same commerce rail as sneakers and groceries
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How AI is transforming trip planning and hotel discovery
AI platforms like ChatGPT, CoPilot and Gemini are increasingly popular tools for planning travel. Unlike traditional search which delivers pages of results, AI narrows down the selection.
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China’s Hotel Market Is No Longer Global - It’s Platform-Controlled
China’s hotel market is increasingly shaped by domestic digital platforms, with companies controlling distribution, pricing visibility, and customer access in ways that differ significantly from those in Western markets…
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