---
title: "Expedia amazoned hotel rooms"
slug: expedia-amazoned-hotel-rooms
url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/expedia-amazoned-hotel-rooms
canonical_url: https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/
content_type: essay
language: en
published_at: 2026-10-15T00:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2026-10-16T20:17:18.805Z
author: "Cory Doctorow"
author_url: https://pluralistic.net
authored_by: human
publisher: "Pluralistic"
publisher_url: https://pluralistic.net
topics: ["Antitrust", "Economics", "Travel", "Enshittification"]
license: CC-BY-4.0
word_count: 1478
reading_minutes: 6
citation: "Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic. \"Expedia amazoned hotel rooms.\" 15 Oct 2026. https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/ (CC-BY-4.0)"
# The full text follows. The web page shows an extract and sends readers
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---
# Expedia amazoned hotel rooms
> Cory Doctorow explains how Amazon's junk fees and most-favored-nation pricing rules raise prices for shoppers everywhere, not just on Amazon, and argues Expedia has done the same thing to hotel rooms, making travel more expensive for everyone through monopoly intermediaries.
# Expedia amazoned hotel rooms
No matter where you shop, you're getting screwed by Amazon. Amazon has found a way to make everything you buy – at Target, at a mom-and-pop shop, even direct from the manufacturer – more expensive. And they're not the only one: Expedia's done the same thing, but for hotel rooms.
Here's how Amazon broke the economy: first, they locked in a key group of shoppers. The vast majority of affluent shoppers in the USA have Amazon Prime accounts. Having prepaid for a year's shipping in advance, those Prime subscribers start their purchasing journey by searching Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for, that's where it ends.
America's affluent top decile – the 10% of richest Americans – do the majority of America's shopping, a phenomenon that has only been accelerated by America's precipitous slide into oligarchy, which has exhausted the savings *and* the credit-card limits *and* the home equity of the majority of Americans, who increasingly can't afford to buy anything:
If you want to sell things in America, you *must* sell them in the place where the top decile shops, and that's Amazon. For merchants, that is an *incredibly* expensive proposition: 51-60% of every dollar you spend with an independent merchant on Amazon is claimed by Amazon through junk fees, listing fees, commissions, processing fees and other scams:
Merchants don't have 51-60% margins they can afford to turn over to Amazon. To remain viable while selling on Amazon, they have to raise prices. Amazon doesn't mind if prices go up, so long as Amazon's price remains competitive. So Amazon imposes a requirement on its suppliers called "most favored nation," which requires sellers to offer their best price on Amazon:
Practically speaking, that means that when you raise your price on Amazon, you *must* raise your prices *everywhere* by the same amount, which means that no matter where you shop (Target, Walmart, the corner store or direct from the factory), you pay the Amazon Tax.
The Amazon Tax is a prime (you should forgive the expression) example of enshittification, in which an *intermediary* (a business that sits between buyers and sellers, AKA, "a platform") screws *both* customers *and* sellers to benefit itself.
But Amazon isn't the only example of a powerful digital intermediary that has used its market power to impose an economy-wide tax. Wherever you look online, you find digital giants who grew the way Amazon grew (buying all of their competitors) and then did what Amazon did (squeezing buyers and sellers, making prices higher everywhere).
That's what happened with Expedia. Almost every travel site you can find online has been purchased by Expedia (Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz), and the ones that aren't Expedia subsidiaries were acquired by its main rival, Priceline (Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda and even Opentable). Nearly all the hotel rooms are booked by a tiny minority of travelers – largely that same top decile that Amazon has so thoroughly captured and locked in – and hoteliers can't live without their business, and they're almost all Expedia and/or Priceline customers. Expedia accounts for *80%* of all hotel bookings by dollar value.
Expedia's position, in other words, is basically Amazon's position, so Expedia is doing exactly what Amazon is doing: they charge huge fees to hotels, and then force the hotels to raise their prices everywhere through a "most favored nation" deal:
But – as Lee Hepner writes for the BIG newsletter – Expedia has figured out ways to out-Amazon Amazon. They've copied one of Amazon's sleaziest businesses, and *made it worse*:
Here's Amazon's sleaziest commercial practice: when you search Amazon, the top results for your search aren't the best matches for your queries; they're products sold by the companies willing to pay the most for search placement, in a "real-time auction" that runs every time you search. The cost of winning that auction comes out of your pocket through higher prices: the first result for an Amazon query is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match. The top row is *25% more* expensive. On average, the best match for your query is *17* positions down the screen, on the second page, where almost no one ever bothers to scroll:
This rip-off is Amazon's *most* profitable line of business, more profitable than AWS or Prime. It makes the company more than *$80b/year*. And – incredibly – Expedia's found a way to make it even worse.
Like Amazon, Expedia auctions off its search results. They call this their "VIP listing" program. Practically speaking, hotels *have* to pay for this, because it boosts booking rates by 42% (the first ten results on an Expedia search-results page get 62% of the clicks). VIP listing is expensive for the merchant – but it's even more expensive for you and me.
That's because Expedia requires hotels in its VIP listings programs to *raise their prices on non-Expedia sites by 10-25%…INDEFINITELY.*
Let me repeat that: to stay in business, hotels need to be on Expedia. To stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to raise their prices to pay Expedia's junk fees, but they have to raise their prices everywhere else. But to *really* stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to use the VIP program, which is even *more* expensive. And – one more time – hotels in the VIP program have to jack up their prices *everywhere else, INDEFINITELY*. This means that, throughout the economy, hotel prices are rising at a superinflationary rate, because Expedia – who command 80% of the market – are pushing those prices up.
This goes a long way to explaining why US hotel rates rose *58%* from a 2020 average of $103/night to a 2025 average of $162/night. It explains why hotel prices rose by 5% *last year*, which is *double* the rate of inflation. And this is why Expedia stock is up 65% since the start of the Iran war, a fact that Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin attributes to "higher margins" from "higher prices":
In his coverage of the Expedia lawsuit – which brought many of these details to light – Hepner notes that hotels themselves have undergone near-total cartelization, with Hilton, Marriott, and Choice International owning the majority of all hotels after a string of acquisitions that went largely unchallenged by slumbering antitrust regulators around the world. These consolidated chains have *also* jacked up prices and enshittified their service, slashing housekeeping and check-in staff and allowing their facilities to slip into disrepair.
This, too, is characteristic of monopolization: whenever a monopoly takes over part of its supply chain, the rest of the supply chain consolidates to prevent itself from being ripped off by the new giant. This is the story of publishers consolidating to defend themselves from Borders/B&N, Walmart and Costco, then Amazon; and it's the story of literary agencies consolidating to resist the power of those overgrown publishers.
And it's the story of health-care, which saw consolidation in pharmaceuticals leading to mergers among hospitals, who screwed the insurers, who also consolidated.
In every case, it's the workers and the people who rely on them that get the shitty end of the stick. Hotel guests, readers and patients pay more for inferior products. Writers, editors, doctors, nurses, hotel staff and housekeepers get lower pay and worse working-conditions:
There is nothing wrong with the idea of an intermediary. Most writers can't publish and sell their own books, and few travelers can navigate finding hotels in strange cities without help. The problem of intermediaries is that when intermediaries gain monopoly power – by buying their rivals and capturing buyers and sellers – they are able to squeeze both. As Tim Wu says, this is the moment when a company that's supposed to be helping becomes a predator, acquires "main character syndrome" and makes every transaction all about the middleman, at the expense of the people buying and selling:
There are so many reasons for inflation and the cost of living crisis: wage stagnation, wars of choice in Iran, environmental cataclysm after environmental cataclysm. But under cover of these real factors is a cohort of what Matt Stoller calls "economic termites," parasites that have infested the walls of our economy and are devouring it from within.
You can't solve this by shopping. Calling the hotel direct won't fix it: they have to be on Expedia to survive, and to be on Expedia, they have to sign up for VIP service, and to keep VIP service, they have to make their prices higher everywhere. To fix this, we need systemic action: the corporate death penalty for the companies that are consuming the structural members of our society.
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