More and more of us are staying home for our holidays — but even so, our small hotels and B&Bs are folding at a scary rate. UK hotel insolvencies are up 60 per cent, it was reported last week. Why? Competition bites, said the papers, blaming Airbnb. But there’s another biter, too — more sinister for seeming more helpful.
The majority of hotel bookings are now made on the internet, and most of those via one of the two enormous internet travel companies: Booking Holdings and Expedia. It might seem to you and me, as we click away the January blues, that there’s a swarm of jostling online travel agencies (or OTAs) — Trivago, Kayak, Agoda, Hotels.com, Priceline — but the reality is that almost all of them belong to, or are ‘affiliate partners’ of, Booking Holdings or Expedia. It’s a near duopoly, and these two tentacular monsters, the giant vampire squids of travel, are beginning to suck the life out of the small fry they claim to help.
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