As we’ve worked to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), many stakeholders have been satisfied with our updates, but a handful of intermediary comparison sites are calling for even more extreme changes that would meaningfully degrade helpful features for users. While we hope it does not come to this, we’ve been testing the removal of hotel features from Google Search in Europe to understand how this would affect users and websites.
Here are the results:
- People were measurably less satisfied with their search results and it took them longer to find hotels, including by having to do more searches. More people also gave up and did not find what they were looking for.
- Overall, traffic to hotels and intermediary sites went down.
- Hotels lost the most traffic (more than 10%), affecting hundreds of thousands of European hotels.
- Traffic to intermediary sites largely stayed flat.
Based on the negative impacts we’ve already seen, we’ve stopped the test.
To comply with the DMA, we have already made significant changes that have already diverted traffic from hotels to intermediaries, effectively raising prices for consumers. Hotels and industry groups like the German Hotel Association (IHA) have shared their concerns about further steps that would remove hotel features from Google Search.
As we are pushed towards more changes, we may have to remove these kinds of helpful features altogether. The results of this test show that this would be a lose-lose situation for both users and European businesses. We look forward to discussing these findings with the European Commission and working to find a more balanced solution.
Read our original blog here.