Expedia uses its near-monopoly over hotel bookings to charge hotels heavy fees and force them to raise prices everywhere, making travel more expensive for everyone.
No matter where you shop, you are paying the Amazon Tax. Amazon locks in affluent shoppers, then forces merchants to raise prices across the board. Expedia has pulled the same trick on hotel rooms.
A hotel-sized Amazon Tax
Expedia has swallowed nearly every booking site — Hotels.com, Travelocity, Orbitz — and now controls 80% of all hotel bookings by dollar value. Hotels cannot survive without it, so it extracts heavy fees just like Amazon does from merchants.
It gets worse: Expedia imposes a 'most favoured nation' clause. The room rate you list on Expedia must be your lowest price anywhere. To cover Expedia's fees, hotels raise prices, and because of that clause, they must raise them on every other platform too.
The VIP list: buying a more expensive future
Amazon's search results are an auction — whoever pays most ranks first. Expedia copied this and calls it the 'VIP listing' programme. Hotels in the first ten results capture 62% of clicks, and the programme boosts bookings by 42%.
The sting is in the fine print: VIP hotels are required to raise their prices on non-Expedia sites by 10 to 25%, indefinitely. Skip Expedia and book direct, and you still pay a price inflated by Expedia's rules.
The fallout up and down the chain
Expedia's squeeze is a wedge driving consolidation throughout the industry. To protect themselves, hotels are merging into giants — Hilton, Marriott and Choice now own most of the market.
Monopoly begets monopoly, so the price hikes radiate from Expedia outward. The bill lands on travellers: US average hotel rates rose from $103 a night in 2020 to $162 in 2025, and another 5% last year — double the inflation rate.
Expedia stock is soaring; its CEO openly credits 'higher prices' for 'higher margins'. The author's prescription is blunt: only systemic anti-monopoly action can dismantle this rent-extracting machine.
Why it matters
This is not about whether one booking site is pricey. It shows how a monopolising middleman turns a commission into a universal tax — even when you bypass it and book direct, the price has already been rigged by its rules.
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