Compliance and regulations unique to the European market are seeing changes in the way hotels are handled on Googles SERP. The Digital Markets Act forbid Google and other tech giants from having preferential rankings for their first-party reviews and sales platforms. As such, Google’s built-in and default hotel price comparison feature is now something that European hotels can opt out from. Beyond that, all hotels within the European Economic Area (EEA) can now remove pricing information from showing up in Google Search results entirely.
For those within the hospitality industry, they are very aware of the “pay to win” environment that Google fostered on its platform. For many, to get their hotel to rank on these algorithmic comparisons, they either need to buy sponsored ad space or lower their prices. Many of the lowest priced tickets on Google are either for an ‘economic’ version of the product, which is not the version most consumers are expecting, or are otherwise inflated significantly by “junk fees” and other additional expenses that are only tallied up at checkout, the initial advertised price non-representative of what consumers would actually pay.
These dishonest pricing tactics are a game that the hospitality industry is forced to play in order to remain competitive. Within the EEA though, there are some steps being taken so that not every hotel or ticket seller needs to sully their reputation for the sake of marketing. European Google SERPs continue to change drastically from how they appear in North America and other parts of the world. With several European specific changes in just the past six months, marketers will eventually need to develop totally different advertising strategies for this part of the world. The European market will continue to drift as compliance becomes increasingly different in this part of the world, but it may also be possible that those regulations starting in the EEA will see adoption elsewhere. The local search landscape will continue to change, and it will be the jobs of advertising experts to know which way search is headed.