At the end of November, Google reported that it was testing a change in the display of hotel search results in a group of European countries in order to comply with EU provisions on equal market competition.
When searching for a hotel, Google displays in the most prominent places three paid results from specialized search engines and portals such as Booking.com or Check24, and below them an interactive map with hotel data that also shows the prices of overnight stays.
Hotels that have not paid for ads are displayed only below the map.
That’s why Google decided to experimentally remove paid ads and an interactive map from the most prominent search results in Germany, Belgium and Estonia, recognizing with that test, at least temporarily, the demands of competitors in the hotel sector who want to travelers will be prevented from directly booking accommodation through search results.
The technology giant emphasized that after the end of the test, the results in that group of countries will be shown again according to the ‘old’ model.
On Thursday, the company announced that it had completed the test, with the conclusion that removing direct bookings would harm both users and European hotel companies.
“We stopped the test due to the negative consequences we noted (and before the planned end),” wrote the head of Google’s legal department, Oliver Bethell, in a blog post Thursday.
Google justified the decision with a lower number of queries for hotel searches.
Google reported that the total number of hotel search queries decreased during that period.
“The largest decline in traffic (by more than 10 percent) was recorded by hotels, which affected hundreds of thousands of European hotels,” wrote Bethell.
According to him, the traffic on the websites for intermediation in booking hotel accommodation was more or less unchanged.
The European Commission granted Google’s Alphabet the status of a dominant player on the digital services market subject to the outdated regulations on equal market competition, the dpa news agency recalled. The list also includes Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Booking and ByteDance.