Research by Which? has suggested that 80% of hotel rooms can be booked more cheaply by going direct than through the OTAs.
The company blamed rate parity clauses, with UKHospitality calling for the UK to follow countries in mainland Europe by banning them.
Which? Travel said: “OTAs want the best deals for themselves, so they ban many hotels from advertising lower rates on their own websites. This small print is written into their contracts – a practice which is illegal in Austria, France and Italy, where it’s considered anti-competitive. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority stopped short of doing the same, despite a recent crackdown on unfair practices in the hotel-booking industry.”
UKHospitality CEO Kate Nicholls said: “This data reiterates what we have been saying for a long time. Parity clauses do not favour consumers and they take commercial power away from the hotels. They have been banned in other European countries and they should be banned in the UK.”
A spokesperson for Expedia told Which?: “We provide a global marketplace for chains and independent hotels alike to compete with their peer hotels, by making them visible and bookable worldwide.” Booking.com agreed, saying: ‘Our platform is a really cost-effective marketing channel. Hotels only pay if we do our job well and get them a booking.”
Following the bans in mainland Europe, in 2017 the European Competition Network co-ordinated efforts across 10 member states, sending questionnaires to 16,000 hotels, 20 OTAs, 11 metasearch websites and 19 large hotel chains, with the conclusion that allowing OTAs to use narrow rate parity clauses, and then prohibiting OTAs from using them altogether, had “generally improved conditions for competition and led to more choice for consumers”.
The study found, however, that 47% of the hotels that responded to the electronic survey did not know that Booking.com and Expedia had changed or removed their parity clauses. This figure was lower in France and Germany, at 30%. Of those hotels that knew about the changes, the majority said they had not acted upon them in any way.
