For years, hotels have relied on Google’s ecosystem – whether through organic search, paid advertising, or metasearch visibility – to drive direct bookings.
NB: This is an article from Triptease
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However, as regulations tighten, Google’s ability to prioritize its own services and ad placements could be restricted. This could theoretically lead to a more level playing field where smaller hotel brands and direct booking platforms gain better visibility without having to outbid major Online Travel Agents (OTAs).
In practice, it’s a bit more complicated. With new regulations potentially limiting Google’s search functionalities, hotels could face increased competition from OTAs, who are not held to the same regulations as Google and may invest further in their own marketing channels to capture displaced demand (though Booking.com – still the biggest global OTA – is facing its own DMA-related regulatory challenge).
Google’s changes in the wake of the DMA
Since being named a DMA “gatekeeper” by the European Commission back in November 2023, Google has made a number of changes to its search engine in order to satisfy all the requirements of this landmark act. These have included removing links to its own vertical search services (VSS) and changing the user experience on its EU search engine results pages (SERPs) to deprioritize its own offerings. Google (perhaps unsurprisingly) frames these changes as “removing useful features … and reducing functionality”, though there is certainly debate as to whether they’ve had the desired effect of increasing fair competition between businesses and improving options for end users.
But there may be more DMA-driven changes to come. In late 2024, Google ran a test in Germany, Belgium and Estonia that took their search results back in time, in response to criticism by some industry players that previous changes haven’t gone far enough.
What changes did Google test?
In this test Google removed many of the features that have been seen as standard on the search engine for years, including maps, reverting back to its old approach of simply showing a list of links.
This return to the “old ‘ten blue links’ format from years ago” didn’t last long and looks like a deliberately provocative move to illustrate where hard-line interpretation of the DMA could lead. After all, not every search optimization or design change warrants a dedicated blog post from a senior member of Google’s legal team (in this case no less than the Director, EMEA Competition). But nonetheless, it was an interesting sign of what the future could look like.
We had a look at the search engine results pages for the EU as a whole, and for the countries impacted by this test. When looking at specific hotel name search (i.e. “Radisson Blu Berlin”, we did not see a marked difference in the results shown. However, when looking at more general terms (ie “hotels in alexanderplatz Berlin”), the lack of additional visuals and graphics was striking. The page definitely started to look more like the Google of a decade ago – no maps, images or additional hotel creatives leading to booking options. However, this distinction was presumably a design choice by Google for the purposes of bounding the test, rather than a conceptual limitation.
