Hotel Association to lobby against Expedia and Priceline

After baring their teeth to AirBnB, the American Hotel and Lodging Association has set their sights on OTA giants Expedia and Priceline.

Hotels Plan Lobbying Push Over Priceline-Expedia ‘Monopoly’

The U.S. hotel industry plans to step up a lobbying and public relations attack on Expedia Inc. and Priceline Group Inc., hoping to convince consumers and members of the Trump administration that the travel-booking giants are monopolistic.

They are planning to lobby President Trump’s newly appointed members of the Federal Trade Commission in the hopes of convincing them that these two companies constitute a monopoly.  Given Trump’s own ties to the hotel industry, perhaps they will find FTC officials to be receptive to their position.

Some of the planned actions that have been laid out by the AHLA:

• Create a marketing campaign based around the classic board game Monopoly. They want to demonstrate that Booking, Hotwire, Kayak, and Travelocity are all owned by just two big players.
• Promote the hotel industry as tech-savvy and a leader in technology.  They want to show the hotel industry to be an innovator with an important voice in technology policy discussions.  To do this they want to encourage hotel executives to speak at technology conferences and arrange “field trips” for political staff to visit hotel “innovation labs.”