The EU fined Google for burying its rivals in hotel search. The hotel was never one of them

Brussels fined Google €460 million on Thursday for putting its own Hotels, Flights and Shopping above competing services — and on Google's own published record, its fix for that has been to hand more of the page to comparison sites.

Driving the news. The European Commission fined Google €890 million on Thursday, the first penalty against the company under the Digital Markets Act. Of that, €460 million covers the search breach: the Commission found Google gave its own services — Shopping, Flights and Hotels — better placement and richer treatment in results than the competing services answering the same query. The rest covers the Play store. Google must now treat third-party services in its results in what the Commission calls a fair and non-discriminatory manner. Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, called it "product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants." The company has not said whether it will appeal.

The order is about the page, not the money. The fine itself is a rounding error against Alphabet's quarter. What matters to a hotel is the second half of the decision: Google has to rebuild how its hotel results are arranged, and the Commission has said it will keep watching how that gets done. Google has already been testing changes, and Brussels calls some of them progress.

Google has shown its hand three times already. In March 2024 it shipped more than twenty changes for Europe, including dedicated units and chips pointing users to comparison sites in hotels, flights and shopping — and it deleted the Google Flights unit outright rather than keep balancing it. That December it proposed going further: equally formatted units letting a searcher choose between a comparison site and a supplier's own website, richer formats showing prices and pictures for both, and new ad units for comparison sites. In February this year, Reuters reported it was preparing to test giving rival travel and booking platforms more prominent placement still.

Read the pattern. Each time Google is told to stop favoring its own hotel product, the fix is more page given to intermediaries, and some of it sold back to them as advertising. The supplier's direct link is in the proposals — Google put it there — but it arrives as one option inside a unit built for comparison shopping, next to the parts that are monetized. And the escalation case is worse, not better: strip the hotel unit the way the Flights unit was stripped, and the query falls to whatever ranks underneath, which in European hotel search is Booking.com and its peers. Neither branch of this ends with a hotel's own website gaining ground.

The catch. Nothing is designed yet. Google hasn't confirmed an appeal, the remedy will be argued for months, and the page will likely change several more times before it settles. That argument runs between Google, the comparison services and the large travel platforms — the parties the DMA defines as competing with a gatekeeper. A hotel is supply. It is what all of them are selling, and it is not the protected class.

What it means for hotels. Your Google traffic is going to move again for reasons that have nothing to do with your property, your rate or your reviews. You have no seat in the room where that gets settled, so the question worth answering is the one you can: how much of your business currently arrives through a page you don't control, and what it would cost to hold that position if the free direct link becomes another paid unit. That is the direction every proposal so far has traveled.

Two years of investigation established that Google favored its own hotel product over its rivals'. The hotel appears throughout that case as the thing being ranked, and nowhere in it as the party being wronged.