Ranking in Online Travel Agencies
In class, we learned about how websites such as Google and Facebook price their advertisement slots with auctions to determine where the advertisement is located. Interestingly, different from that, online travel agencies are using a different method for the rankings of its search results. This practice is euphemistically called “dimming.” When an online travel agency dims a hotel, the website deliberately minimizes the hotel’s exposure (number of photos shown) or ranking in the online agency’s results.
This practice was put into practice this spring. After hotels won a series of court victories in Europe that effectively allowed them to offer lower rates on their own websites. Instead of giving online agencies their best rates, hotels can now save the best rates from their own websites and give the agencies a higher rate. “As of July 21, OTA Insight said that slightly more than 1 percent of Expedia’s 260,000 hotel properties were dimmed.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/how-online-travel-agencies-are-dimming-results-on-hotel-searches/2016/07/28/16a33026-52ab-11e6-88eb-7dda4e2f2aec_story.html