Enshittification

In 2005, a Dutch startup called Booking.com offered hotels a deal: list your rooms on our platform for a 12% commission, and we will send you customers you would not otherwise reach. Hotels signed up; travelers followed, because the inventory was there, and by the early 2010s, Booking.com was the dominant hotel search platform across Europe and much of Asia. Then the commissions started climbing. By 2019, many hotels were paying 25-30% per booking, plus additional fees for “preferred placement” near the top of search results. Hotels that declined to pay for placement found themselves buried behind those that did. The traveler experience degraded too: search results increasingly reflected who had paid for prominence, not which hotel best matched the search. Hotels understood what had happened, but they were locked in. Their repeat customers now booked through Booking.com rather than directly, because that was where travelers looked. A hotel that left the platform did not take its…