Duff on Hospitality Law

Happy Monday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 19, 2025, is below. This week’s Update features a heavy concentration of important legal updates on local Chinese efforts to investigate the practices of OTAs, the FTC’s newly announced investigation into Instacart and its alleged surveillance pricing practices and an important German court decision that may have wide ranging effects across Europe on pending class actions against Booking.com. Enjoy.

• • ChatGPT’s App Store Is Open for Business – Everyone’s Business. OpenAI announced this past week that it is now allowing third party developers to build and list apps inside ChatGPT. Once approved, the apps will be listed in ChatGPT’s App Directory. Users can summon these news apps via the ChatGPT tools menu, via @mentions or when ChatGPT deems the app relevant to the current session. In theory, a single vacation planning session could trigger multiple travel apps – competing OTAs, suppliers, etc. So much for ChatGPT’s initial pilot partners – Expedia and Booking.com – and let the battle for session relevance among competing apps on ChatGPT begin.
  • FTC Launches Investigation into Instacart Pricing Practices. It was just two weeks ago that we committed to exploring further the practice of personalized (or “surveillance”) pricing, its use in online transactions (specifically travel) and likely regulation. With the addition of personalized pricing to our daily news searches, my inbox is already being inundated with personalized pricing stories and newly announced regulations. Instacart has featured prominently these past two weeks as a study two weeks ago claimed to demonstrate the wide variety in pricing among users for the same items and then this week, likely in reaction to the announced study, the FTC has reportedly sent Instacart a civil investigation demand to investigate the online retailer’s pricing practices.
  • German Court Allows Hoteliers’ Claims Against Booking.com To Proceed. In a ruling last week, a Berlin court found that Booking.com’s use of rate parity provisions between January 2013 and January 2016 restricted German hotels’ ability to set competitive prices in violation of EC competition laws. According to the court’s decision, the OTA’s use of both broad parity provisions and later, narrow party provisions, unlawfully constrained hotels’ pricing freedom. The ruling clears the way for nearly 1,100 German hotels to proceed with competition claims against the OTA. The Berlin court’s decision follows an earlier 2024 decision by the European Court of Justice that found that Booking.com’s use of rate parity provisions violated competition law across Europe. This latest decision could prove quite helpful to other EU hoteliers and their pending class action claims against Booking.com arising, in part, out of its use of the same rate parity provisions.

Have a great week everyone, and Happy Holidays.

Good Sunday afternoon from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 12, 2025, is below. This week’s Update includes a number of updates to stories we featured previously, including stories on the existential threat (or not) to OTAs posed by new AI platforms and the Trump administration’s threatened takeover of state-level AI regulation (no longer a threat, but a reality). Enjoy.

• • Do AI Platforms Really Pose an Existential Threat to OTAs? This week we offer several conflicting perspectives on the question from Booking Holdings’ CFO (who believes, among other things, that AI will expand the overall market of online travel benefiting Booking Holdings and other online intermediaries (“rising tides”)) and Skift’s Dennis Schaal (who, I believe has a far more realistic and less vested perspective, believes that change for the OTAs is unavoidable).
  • Google Ties AI Overviews with AI Mode. For those of you who have seen my presentation on AI and distribution, you’ll understand the significance with which I viewed this latest announcement from Google. Mobile users of Google’s AI Overviews (which is just about everyone) will now be able to seamlessly transition from AI Overviews to AI Mode for further detail or clarification on their initial query. Users of AI Overviews will be able to “Ask a follow up,” which will take them directly into AI Mode. Together, this latest announcement and Google’s previously announced plans to position its AI mode as a complete travel planning and booking platform will only further threaten the relevancy of traditional online search.
  • Amazon vs. Perplexity. In early November, Amazon filed suit against Perplexity in Northern California District Court alleging that the AI platform’s use of AI agents (Comet AI Agents) on Amazon’s website not only violates Amazon’s terms and conditions but also constitutes violations of federal (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and California state (California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act) law. Amazon seeks both special (injunction) and monetary (damages) relief. How might such a lawsuit (or its outcome) affect online travel? Great question. We see many potential parallels to be drawn and potential lessons to be learned. For anyone concerned about how AI agents might access and use their websites, I’d encourage you to read the complaint and specifically, those sections detailing Amazon’s efforts to restrict AI agents’ access. Expect to see updates on Amazon’s claim in future Online Travel Updates. A copy of Amazon’s complaint is linked below.
  • OpenAI Curtails App Suggestions – For Now. By now, most everyone is probably familiar with the recent launch of apps (including Expedia and Booking.com) within ChatGPT’s ecosystem. Not only can users “summon” these apps through various means, but the apps can also be offered up by ChatGPT whenever ChatGPT believes that the app may be relevant to the user’s prompts. Apparently, these app suggests look strikingly similar to advertisements and as a result have created quite a backlash among ChapGPT users (who naively believe that ChatGPT will remain forever ad free). For now, OpenAI is turning off the app suggestions and may even allow users to permanently turn off app suggestions (or at least tailor which apps are suggested) in the future.

We have a lot in store for 2026, including the introduction of a new Online Trave Update podcast.

Have a great week everyone.

Good Sunday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 5, 2025, is below. With last week’s Thanksgiving holiday break, our list of stories this week is longer than usual. Enjoy.

• • Otto Introduces AI Assistant for Business Travel. Seattle-based Otto’s release this past week of its new AI-enabled business travel assistant, Otto the Agent, garnered many of the industry’s headlines, including headlines by Seattle’s own Geekwire. If you are a regular reader of our Updates, you know that Geekwire is Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Focused technology news service. Those behind the new startup include a who’s who of travel industry veterans, including Spotnana’s Steve Singh, Orbitz’s Barney Harford and Expedia’s Michael Gulmann. The platform, which has been in beta tests since August 2024, is designed to learn travelers’ travel habits and then apply those learnings to planning and booking (without leaving the platform) travel – for now, flights and hotels. For the next 12 months, the platform will be free to individual users and small businesses. 

• • Personalized Pricing in Legislative and Regulatory Crosshairs. Given the number of questions we’ve fielded over the past few weeks regarding personalized pricing and now New York’s recently enacted legislation, I think it time to put personalized pricing on our distribution radar and list of “distribution” related topics that we monitor daily. This week, we feature two stories on the growing calls to regulate so-called “surveillance” pricing, including New York’s October passage of surveillance legislation that requires New York businesses to notify consumers whenever personal information is used when setting pricing. New York is not alone is considering steps to combat this allegedly abusive practice as several states considered similar (often bipartisan) legislation this past year. Much of this legislation activity is built on earlier efforts by the FTC that were abandoned with the change in administrations. How these state-level efforts might fair in light of the Trump Administration’s threatened Executive Order limiting state-level regulation of artificial intelligence remains to be seen. How these rules might affect the travel industry, including the use of personalized offers and promotions (think targeted loyalty program promotions) also remains to be seen. We plan to cover all of these topics and more in future Updates.

• • Confusing Headline Calls into Question Hopper’s Long Term Travel Plans. On November 24, Skift ran a story stating that Capital One (one of the largest known users of Hopper’s B2B booking platform and Hopper investor) was “buying” (not licensing, as it already likely does) Hopper’s software that powers Capital One’s cardholder travel platform and hiring several members of Hopper’s hotel and engineering teams.  What this change might mean for Hopper’s declining B2C and remaining B2B distribution business is unclear. 

• • Power of Event Based Travel Leads Trip.com to Add Tickets to Its Online Inventory. Trip.com recently announced a new partnership with Ireland-based ticketing company, Coras, that will provide the traditional OTA and its users with access to tickets for major concerts, sports and theater events. Users of Trip.com will now be able to see real time availability and pricing for events “in path” without being re-directed to another booking website. According to Coras CEO, Mark McLaughlin, events (thank Taylor Swift and her recent Eras tour) have become a huge motivator for travel and event tickets are often the first product that a user purchases. Combining event tickets with other travel products provides travel suppliers an opportunity to upsell flights, hotels and transfers (and not vice versa). From what we’ve learned recently, event ticket sales and distribution can be very different than the distribution of traditional travel products.

• • ARC Shuts Down Program Selling Traveler Data to Department of Homeland Security. This hopefully brings an end to the controversial practice by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) that several of you brought to my attention over the past few weeks.    

Have a great week.