Originally Posted by
GUWonder
…. and this royal “the industry”.
“Did either of those big OTAs sign up to be on the side of any anti-resort fee
cases being advanced by some AGs, and (if so) where is that filed support evident?” Nothing posted above addresses this question.
That’s just not a valid heuristic. There is no logic in this line of thinking. OTAs don’t need to sue their partners to be displeased with one aspect of the partnership. Therefore, there is no requirement to show that they are engaging narrowly your specific behavior. All that is required is to demonstrate that they are unhappy with resort fees, which should be apparent to anyone that has sat through a single hospitality conference.
When booking.com pulled their move, some hotels stopped listing on Booking.com. This was cited as a reason by Expedia for them to not follow suit. No one actually familiar with the dynamic between hotels and OTAs would suggest that OTAs would actively oppose resort fees in the way Traveler’s United did (though TU is clearly OTA friendly on some level). They will not needlessly antagonize some of their biggest partners (and many would argue Booking.com made a mistake).
But yes, Expedia (the OTA Goliath) de-ranks hotels with resort fees. That is an indisputable fact. Is it because they like resort fees? Of course not. They whine about during almost every conference panel from the past 3 years (even in completely unrelated conferences like Skift Loyalty), as even people moderately familiar with hospitality would know.