When France became the first country to fully ban "price parity clauses" in 2015—rules that prevented hotels from offering cheaper deals on their own websites—policymakers imagined a windfall for budget travelers: lower prices across the board, especially in the prominent online listings everyone sees. A new study of 166 European hotels tells a more surprising story: the savings appeared almost nowhere online, but emerged in an unexpected place entirely.
Researchers from The Economic Journal discovered that while online prices dropped only marginally—around 1 to 2 percent, barely measurable—offline prices fell significantly. Customers who picked up the phone, sent an email, or walked into a hotel lobby directly found themselves saving roughly €8.50 per booking on average. The policy worked, in other words, but only for travelers willing to do the work that most do not.
For decades, major booking platforms like Booking.com and Expedia wielded enormous power by preventing hotels from undercutting their rates anywhere else. This created what seemed like a straightforward problem: restrictive rules kept prices artificially high. Remove the rules, the logic went, and competition would flourish. France's 2015 ban was designed to test exactly this assumption, making the country an ideal laboratory for studying whether breaking the platforms' grip would reshape the hotel market.
The findings suggest something more nuanced at play. Hotels appeared reluctant to cut prices where algorithms could see them—on the major platforms themselves. That visibility mattered. Even without explicit price parity clauses, hotels understood that aggressive discounting in prominent online listings risked demotion in search rankings, buried beneath competitors. The platform still held leverage, just through different mechanisms. So instead, hotels began offering discounts where the platforms couldn't easily track them: through direct phone calls, emails, and in-person negotiations. Bookings gradually shifted away from the major platforms toward these offline channels.
Dr. Carlo Reggiani, one of the study's authors, captures the implication plainly: online platforms adapted to preserve their influence even after the restrictive rules vanished. A ban on parity clauses, it turns out, is not the same as a genuinely open market.
The policy's real winners were customers who had time, confidence, and access to negotiate directly. A traveler scrolling through Booking.com on their phone would still see prices roughly the same as before. But someone who took ten minutes to contact a hotel by email, or who visited in person, could often find a better rate. The cheapest room, the research suggests, may be the one that never appears online at all.
This pattern matters beyond France. As the European Union's Digital Markets Act takes aim at the power of large online platforms, policymakers are watching whether simply banning restrictive rules actually delivers competitive digital markets—or whether businesses find new ways to maintain their advantage. The hotel market's experience suggests that understanding how companies adapt is crucial. Transparency and competition require more than removing old obstacles; they may require actively reshaping how platforms operate. For now, the best hotel deal still belongs to those willing to look beyond what's on the screen.