Trivago fined $45M for misleading customers on hotel pricing claims

Well that's revenue and not profit, so they might not have come out on top.

From the article:

> The court found that Trivago would have made between $53 million and $58 million less if customers had always clicked out onto the cheapest offer.

> The court also estimated that consumers ended up paying about $30 million more for their hotel rooms than if they had always clicked on the cheapest offer, rather than the top-position offers featured by Trivago.

It looks like overall this is pretty proportional to the damage actually.

Edit: Though I do agree overall it's important for Trivago to come out net negative if companies are to have a financial incentive not to do this sort of thing. I would agree that the fine should be high enough to ensure that.

The article says they made less than $7 million profit in their entire Australian operation, so $45 million is a pretty large penalty.

Of course not, just as the people who decided to do this and the people who implemented this face no real consequences at all either (if any at all). We need to stop fining companies and start holding people accountable. Companies are nothing more than some ink on a piece of paper; it's people who do good (or bad) things.

From the perspective of trying to keep companies from doing this in the future, that's not really relevant. Trivago gets hurt just as much of the money ends up with the government or with the customers.

Not that I'm against customers getting it, but if you look at it from a straight-forward "give incentives for companies to not follow Trivago's example" perspective, then fining them is enough to accomplish that.

Fraud? Trivago.