Articles tagged “antitrust”

It was a helluva ride but the Expedia-Orbitz deal was never in serious jeopardy because there is plenty of competition despite the Expedia-Travelocity-Orbitz consolidation. But if Expedia gets greedy in the future and uses its new powers unwisely, you can bet that regulators will pounce.

We said all along that increased competition from Booking.com and TripAdvisor's burgeoning power as a hotel-booking site would be enough to get the Expedia-Orbitz deal approved. The Antitrust Division saw Google as an up-and-coming force in flight and hotel bookings, as well.

TripAdvisor is already a must-have for travel marketers, including Expedia and Booking.com. But how big a force the Justice Department believes TripAdvisor will become in hotel booking in the near future could be an Orbitz-Expedia deal-maker or breaker.

With the emergence of TripAdvisor and Google as online travel agency alternatives and Amazon waiting in the wings if it ever figures out what it wants to do in travel, all the signs point toward an increasingly competitive online travel agency market in the U.S. These are factors the DOJ will consider when mulling the Expedia-Orbitz deal.

Old metasearch sites, like old soldiers, don't die. They just fade away. That may be the case for Google Hotel Finder as Google's hotel listings right on the first search results page funnel users in a streamlined way to Google's hotel ads.

How deep will the concessions be that the European Commission will be able to coax out of Google? And will the U.S. Federal Trade Commission be embarrassed into action?

Travel companies speaking out against the all-powerful Google walk a thin line because they are dependent on Google to widely varying degrees. They now have an apparent ally in the European Commission while the U.S. FTC opted out.

TripAdvisor still spends a lot of money with Google so Kaufer's condemnation of Google's practices stands out. Others have been more circumspect.

U.S. and European antitrust authorities have collaborated in their respective probes of Google. Strong antitrust regulatory action in Europe could rekindle interest in the U.S., assuming Google's lobbyists are unsuccessful in squelching it.

Google dodged a bullet in 2013 when the FTC terminated its antitrust probe without forcing meaningful concessions or filing suit. Now we know that the rank and file within the FTC wanted to fight it out with Google in court.