Booking.com and Skoosh Battle Over Price Fixing Accusations

Some of the recent articles about price fixing accusations in the hotel industry:

Skoosh takes on Booking.com in very public battle over rates
http://www.tnooz.com/2010/09/10/news/skoosh-takes-on-booking-com-in-very-public-battle-over-rates/

In a series of articles on the Skoosh company blog, director Dorian Harris has accused Booking.com of asking hoteliers that partner with both companies to raise rates to those of Booking.com.

In some circles this is called a rate parity strategy, others give it a far more inflammatory term for a practice that some regulators are well known to frown on: price fixing.

Harris claims other large hotel sites in the same vein as Booking.com have also carried out similar tactics.

UK regulator steps in to investigate online hotel bookings
http://www.tnooz.com/2010/09/17/news/uk-regulator-steps-in-to-investigate-online-hotel-bookings/

Rate parity under price-fixing investigation
http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/rate_parity_under_price-fixing_investigation/

The Sunday Times, the U.K.’s leading Sunday newspaper, revealed yesterday that the British Competition Authority (the ‘Office of Fair Trading’) is investigating claims of price fixing by Booking.com and other major online hotel distributors and hotel chains.

Allegations of anti-competitive behaviour were submitted to the Office of Fair Trading by discount booking agency Skoosh, back in May 2010. ‘Since the beginning of this year, we’ve received an endless stream of calls and emails from hotels insisting on ‘rate parity’ and forcing us to either raise our prices or remove their properties from our site’, commented the company’s director, Dorian Harris.

OFT launches investigation into online hotel room sales
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11330463

The Office of Fair Trading has launched a formal investigation into alleged price fixing in the online sale of hotel rooms.

The investigation has been triggered by a complaint from a discount website called Skoosh.com

It reported that it was being put under pressure to offer rooms at a standard price.

"We were openly discounting and hotels would email, call and threaten legal action," Skoosh told the BBC.

"Either we'd have to raise prices or take the hotels off our list," said Dorian Harris from Skoosh.

Open letter to Booking.com from Skoosh's CEO:
http://dorian.skoosh.com/?p=133

I wondered how this was all happening so quickly and then I did a little research and found that Booking.com has an active policy of maintaining the same prices for all companies across the internet. I even found a job ad of yours looking for ‘Rate Parity Associates’. It seems like you’ve got a whole team out there beavering away to ‘find any rate inconsistencies between Booking.com and their competitors.’