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Comment by miken123 | Hacker News Reader

> Hotels are concerned that direct booking clicks are down as much as 30% since our compliance changes were implemented. These businesses now have to connect with customers via a handful of intermediaries that typically charge large commissions, while traffic from Google was free.

That's because your search engine results are a joke, not because of the DMA.

If I search for 'hotel <city>', I get an ad from Booking.com, then some hotel ad, then an ad from Trivago, then some Google map with hotels (make sense, but all results there are sponsored by intermediaries), then Booking.com, then Booking.com again, then Expedia, then Tripadvisor, then Trivago.

If you only present me sponsored results from intermediaries, then don't be surprised that people only click on sponsored results of intermediaries.

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https://google.com/hotels

Is what I'm assuming they're talking about?

Also

https://google.com/flights

I use flights all the time. I think mostly because I've not found any of the intermediaries all that good. Google flights provides links to multiple places to buy. Usually I click the link directly to the airline.

I've looked at hotels but rarely use it. Hotel websites, unless they're a major chain, are often pretty crap so booking.com is what I generally use.

Google flights is the only tool (I've seen) that offers so many helpful filter options. It's so easy to find the perfect itinerary. And the overall UX far surpasses anything else.

This is such a weird complaint, Google searches hasn't taken you to the websites of various hotels for a decade or more, maybe a few pages in they did, but the first page of search results have been booking sites and ads for booking sites for a long time.

If the booking sites are such a huge issue for the hotels, which I can honestly believe, then don't use them, or do collective negotiations with them and demand better rates.

The complaint about the maps button not being on the search page is rather funny, because I haven't used that in ages. I've been using search engines which has a ! operator, so !gm or !maps for 10+ years every time I needed a map, so I just didn't notice. While I haven't read the DMA rules, it does seem strange that they can't just link to Google maps.

As far as I understand it, the DMA forbids them from exploiting their dominance in the search engine space to promote Maps. This is similar to the mobile space where users must be presented with a choice of their preferred browser and search engine.

I believe they would be legally okay if they presented users with a choice of their preferred Maps provider (e.g. Google Maps, OSM, Bing, or Apple Maps), but they've decided to implement it in the most obnoxious way possible.

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