Leaked documents reveal the hotel industry's plan to combat Priceline and Expedia via PR and FTC lobbying campaigns, accusing firms of monopolistic practices
Hotel industry will lobby Trump appointees to the FTC — The U.S. hotel industry plans to step up a lobbying and public relations attack …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act of the hotel industry's campaign against online travel agencies. After luring guests with direct-booking perks like free WiFi and digital check-in in 2015 (hotels fighting back with direct-booking perks), and then launching marketing pushes against sites taking commissions of up to 30% per reservation (chains wooing customers away from booking sites), the industry is now taking the fight to Washington — leaked documents show a plan to lobby Trump appointees at the FTC while running a PR campaign casting Priceline and Expedia as monopolies.
The playbook mirrors the industry's parallel war on home-sharing: weeks earlier, leaked documents showed the same lobbying apparatus aimed at Airbnb through state-level bills and funded research (the hotel industry's anti-Airbnb lobbying plan). Two fronts, one strategy — when price competition fails, shift the battlefield to regulators.
First-order effects
- Priceline and Expedia face a coordinated two-pronged attack — an FTC lobbying effort targeting Trump-appointed commissioners and a public relations campaign framing them as monopolistic — directly threatening the up-to-30% commission model on which their booking businesses run.
- Hotel trade groups must fund the lobbying and PR operation, diverting spend from the customer-facing marketing campaigns they launched earlier in May.
Second-order effects
- The online travel agencies are pushed into defensive lobbying of their own in Washington, turning OTA commission economics into a regulatory contest rather than a market one.
- The FTC's agenda becomes a contested prize: the same agency already weighing disclosure rules for personalized pricing would be asked to scrutinize hotel-distribution middlemen, raising the stakes of who fills its commissioner seats.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, incumbent industries will increasingly treat antitrust enforcement as a competitive weapon against intermediaries — the hotel industry's simultaneous campaigns against Priceline, Expedia, and Airbnb point to a structural shift from competing on product to competing through regulation.
- Travel distribution could restructure around whoever controls the regulatory narrative: a receptive FTC would weaken OTA gatekeeping over hotel inventory, while union-backed efforts like the Share Better listing purges show the same coalition extending the approach across lodging categories.
The trend: The hotel industry is escalating from product and marketing competition against digital intermediaries to regulatory and PR warfare, using the FTC and state legislatures as levers against both online travel agencies and home-sharing platforms.