Duff on Hospitality Law

Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 24, is below. It was another interesting week at Booking.com (second in a row) as it faces yet another competition law inquiry – this time from Italian competition authorities over the preferential treatment provided properties in Booking.com’s preferred program. AI regulation also features prominently in this week’s Update as regulators press ahead with restrictions on technology based or assisted pricing. Enjoy.

• • Another Week; Another AI Partnership Announcement. The AI arms race continues. This past week featured another newly announced “AI partnership” between an established intermediary and a large AI platform. This week’s announcement came out of TripAdvisor - one of the very earliest intermediaries to announce an AI partnership with Perplexity. This time TripAdvisor has partnered with Anthropic to make its hotel and experiences inventories available to users of Claude. Claude users can now summon TripAdvisor content by identifying Viator or TripAdvisor as their travel partner. When users are ready to book recommended travel, Claude re-directs them back to TripAdvisor to complete the booking. TripAdvisor also announced last week an expanded partnership with Amazon to assist users of Amazon’s Alexa+ to build travel and modify travel itineraries via voice.
  • OpenAI Adopts Familiar Advertising Pricing Model. According to third party sources, OpenAI has adopted a widely used search advertising payment model – pay per click (PPC) – for its AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Pay per click is the same model used by Google and has become the online marketing industry’s standard. What is a ChatGPT generated click really worth? The market will soon tell us. According to several sources, travel advertising is now routinely appearing on ChatGPT with, wait, you guessed it, OTAs, absolutely dominating the platform (Expedia, Booking.com and Airbnb featured in over 80% of the noted ads). What triggers these ads and to what extent are they tied to specific indicia of users’ intent remains to be seen.
  • Booking.com’s Preferred Program Under Scrutiny. To what extent is a program that allegedly values the commissions paid by suppliers over other consumer oriented factors (quality or value) anti-competitive? That’s the question now before Italian regulators. We will keep an eye on this one. Perhaps regulators will also address the question of what value is a program the purports to offer preferred placement if every competitor is effectively “required” to be part of the same program? What does “preferred” really mean?
  • AI Regulation on the Horizon? For some time now my answer to the often repeated question, “What AI regulations apply to my hospitality operation?” has largely been the same. Not many. Outside the possible use of AI systems in certain “high-risk” decision making (almost exclusively in the employment context for most hospitality operators) or such systems’ access and use of personal information, most of the AI regulations (even outside the U.S.) proposed or adopted over the past few years have had little application. That may soon change. Possible changes in the EU and at the state level may introduce a new era of regulation. At the top of legislators’ and regulators’ minds? Algorithmic or technology assisted pricing. While Maryland’s first of its kind anti-surveillance pricing legislation may specifically exempt the kind of widely used loyalty program or membership pricing often used in the hospitality industry, not all states considering the issue may include similar carve outs.

Have a great week everyone.

Good Sunday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 17, 2026, is below. Booking.com featured prominently in many of last week’s industry headlines and for reasons it would probably rather avoid. Enjoy.

• • The Secret to AI Visibility? NerdWallet. Not really, but according to a recent report by Limy, an AI visibility firm, NerdWallet outperforms Hyatt and other travel suppliers in terms of AI agent visibility. According to Limy, NerdWallet excels at providing content that helps users compare value – points, pricing or other metrics. The good news, at least for now, is that OTAs and other intermediaries didn’t perform much better. As for hotel brands, Marriott and Hilton faired the best (each accounting for roughly 10% of AI citations).
  • Booking.com Data Breach May Present Another Round of Reservation Hijackings. Last weekend, Booking.com sent emails to travelers advising them that hackers had accessed booking data resulting in the disclosure of personal information to third parties. According to Booking, the compromised information includes travelers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers and reservation details. Booking claims that it has issued new PINs to prevent any further unauthorized disclosures. Additional details – size of breach, cause of breach, steps undertaken to correct the breach, etc. – were not provided. Now travelers must wait and see what becomes of their accessed data. Readers of our Update will recall previous stories detailing Booking.com’s prior security issues, including a widely publicized phishing campaign that resulted in compromised hotel reservation data being used to contact travelers for additional (unwarranted) payments. Armed with this new information collected directly from Booking.com, scammers will find it even easier to contact and potentially scam guests.
  • Discovery Yes, But Booking, No. Expedia announced this past week the results of an Expedia commissioned survey measuring travelers’ trust and confidence in AI. According to the survey, only 8% of respondents were comfortable letting AI handle actual travel bookings. In contrast, 53% of respondents were comfortable with AI-generated suggestions, 42% of respondents were comfortable using AI to track pricing and 40% were comfortable letting AI build travel itineraries. Why the gap? Respondents cited the loss of control, concerns over data privacy, fears of misuse and the perceived inadequacy of customer service should something wrong with the AI booking occur as reasons for the lack of trust around bookings. A similar survey conducted by Skift last year found that 2% of respondents were comfortable letting AI handle bookings.

Have a great week everyone.

Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 10, is below. It was a relatively quiet week in the online travel industry as evidenced from this week’s stories. Enjoy.

• • Hopper Scores Desperately Needed Victory with RBC. Last week’s newly announced partnership between Hopper and the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) couldn’t have come at a better time for Hopper, which recently announced significant changes with its key financial partner, Capital One. According to last week’s announcement, Hopper will soon power travel for members of RBC’s loyalty program, Avion Rewards. For years, Expedia has served as RBC’s travel partner, but it elected to walk away from the relationship when RBC sought to prohibit Expedia from powering travel for any other Canadian financial institution. I guess exclusivity is a concept that makes Expedia nervous.
  • Who’s Actually Advancing Technologically? Look to the Job Listings. Skift’s founder, Rafat Ali, posted an interesting story this past week on Skift. In the story, Ali posits that job postings provide a strong indicator of which companies are actually “building” AI solutions for travel. A few takeaways from Ali’s review of 170 postings from 13 major travel companies . . .
    
    • The technical specificity of listings, not the volume of listings, was the key differentiator for Ali. Five companies stood out for their postings’ technical specificity – Expedia, Booking Holdings, Airbnb, Agoda and Marriott.
    • Not surprisingly, OTAs accounted for the majority of listed AI positions – 105 of the 170 total positions.
    • Also not surprisingly, Sabre represented the largest “AI gap” (my term, not Ali’s) between AI narrative (advertised “AI first platform”) versus actual AI hiring.
    • Generative AI has been replaced by agentic AI as the key concept/desire in travel AI hiring.

I recognize that Ali’s approach may not be a perfect indicator of a company’s AI prowess, but it may be a leading indicator of what direction a particular company might be heading (or perhaps, hopes to be heading).

• • Booking.com Agrees to Lift Rate Parity Requirements in Chile. Time to add Chile to your list of “no parity” countries in your Booking.com agreements. The Chilean Court for the Defense of Free Competition (TDLC) announced this past week an out-of-court agreement with Booking.com that ends an investigation that began in 2024 with regard to Booking.com’s contracting requirements. As part of the settlement, Booking.com agreed to remove all rate parity provisions from its contracts and to eliminate price controls from its preferred and Genius program participation requirements. The effect of these changes is likely limited to hotels located in Chile.

Have a great week.

Good Saturday afternoon from sunny Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 3, 2026, is below. This week’s Update features a variety of stories, including an update from Amazon and its plans for Alexa Plus and travel. Enjoy.

• • Amazon Seeks to Collapse Travel Discovery and Booking into a Single Platform. It has been a while since we’ve seen an update from Amazon and its plans for its AI user interface, Alexa Plus. Given the recent announcements by both OpenAI and Google regarding their somewhat divergent plans for their AI platforms (and specifically, purchases/bookings on their platforms), Amazon’s latest announcement was quite timely. This past week Amazon announced that Alexa Plus now has the ability to order food through Grubhub and Uber Eats. More importantly, according to the announcement, the new functionality (and supporting architecture) is intended to handle the full transaction from browsing to payment. So what about travel? According to the announcement, travel planning is one of several future possible uses of the new commerce architecture. For now, the pizza order and delivery functionality is limited to Echo devices with screens.
  • Six Weeks and One Hundred Million Dollars. Only six weeks after OpenAI’s commencement of an advertising pilot on its popular ChatGPT platform, OpenAI announced it had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue from the pilot. With that kind of immediate success, it is no surprise that OpenAI is rapidly building out its advertising infrastructure through recent hires and announced partnerships with Smartly and Criteo. Think advertising on popular AI platforms is a thing of the future? Think again.
  • What About Corporate and Managed Travel? Like so many others following the rapid rise of AI and its effects on travel, we’ve been largely focused on AI’s effects on leisure travel. What about corporate and managed travel? Changes are coming.
  • Hoteliers and Amadeus Obtain District Court’s Dismissal of Anti-Trust Case. This past week, an Illinois federal district court dismissed a proposed class action by guests alleging that hoteliers’ sharing of certain future occupancy information through Amadeus’ Demand360 product violated federal antitrust laws. The proposed class action was one of several similar cases brought over the past year or two against hoteliers, casino owners/operators and multi-family owners. Citing a Seventh Circuit decision, the Illinois court held that while the sharing of information can be evidence of an illegal conspiracy, sharing alone is not sufficient evidence of an actual agreement. For our law nerd readers, we’ve linked below the court’s opinion and dismissal order.

Have a great week everyone.