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 of the hotel, and its popularity, into account.
It should be pointed out that the compensation that Expedia receives is another factor in determining a hotel’s placement on an Expedia page. The company has an accelerator program, as does rival Booking Holdings, where hotels can pay extra to appear higher than they ordinarily would on Expedia’s pages.
So charging a resort fee won’t necessarily sink a hotel listing lower than dozens of other hotels, but it would likely making the property’s presence on Expedia less prominent than it would have otherwise been.
WHAT IS THE CONTEXT?
Expedia’s action on resort fees, which is considered tepid by some and too harsh by some hoteliers, comes after Booking Holdings announced several months ago that it would begin charging hotels commission on their resort fees.
Some hotels offer a basic room rate, such as $250 per night, as the first rate that consumers might see online, and only when consumers get further into the booking process do they find out that they would also get charged another $30 or $40 per night as a mandatory resort or facilities fee.
