Duff on Hospitality Law

Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 10, is below. It was a relatively quiet week in the online travel industry as evidenced from this week’s stories. Enjoy.

• • Hopper Scores Desperately Needed Victory with RBC. Last week’s newly announced partnership between Hopper and the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) couldn’t have come at a better time for Hopper, which recently announced significant changes with its key financial partner, Capital One. According to last week’s announcement, Hopper will soon power travel for members of RBC’s loyalty program, Avion Rewards. For years, Expedia has served as RBC’s travel partner, but it elected to walk away from the relationship when RBC sought to prohibit Expedia from powering travel for any other Canadian financial institution. I guess exclusivity is a concept that makes Expedia nervous.
  • Who’s Actually Advancing Technologically? Look to the Job Listings. Skift’s founder, Rafat Ali, posted an interesting story this past week on Skift. In the story, Ali posits that job postings provide a strong indicator of which companies are actually “building” AI solutions for travel. A few takeaways from Ali’s review of 170 postings from 13 major travel companies . . .
    
    • The technical specificity of listings, not the volume of listings, was the key differentiator for Ali. Five companies stood out for their postings’ technical specificity – Expedia, Booking Holdings, Airbnb, Agoda and Marriott.
    • Not surprisingly, OTAs accounted for the majority of listed AI positions – 105 of the 170 total positions.
    • Also not surprisingly, Sabre represented the largest “AI gap” (my term, not Ali’s) between AI narrative (advertised “AI first platform”) versus actual AI hiring.
    • Generative AI has been replaced by agentic AI as the key concept/desire in travel AI hiring.

I recognize that Ali’s approach may not be a perfect indicator of a company’s AI prowess, but it may be a leading indicator of what direction a particular company might be heading (or perhaps, hopes to be heading).

• • Booking.com Agrees to Lift Rate Parity Requirements in Chile. Time to add Chile to your list of “no parity” countries in your Booking.com agreements. The Chilean Court for the Defense of Free Competition (TDLC) announced this past week an out-of-court agreement with Booking.com that ends an investigation that began in 2024 with regard to Booking.com’s contracting requirements. As part of the settlement, Booking.com agreed to remove all rate parity provisions from its contracts and to eliminate price controls from its preferred and Genius program participation requirements. The effect of these changes is likely limited to hotels located in Chile.

Have a great week.

Good Saturday afternoon from sunny Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 3, 2026, is below. This week’s Update features a variety of stories, including an update from Amazon and its plans for Alexa Plus and travel. Enjoy.

• • Amazon Seeks to Collapse Travel Discovery and Booking into a Single Platform. It has been a while since we’ve seen an update from Amazon and its plans for its AI user interface, Alexa Plus. Given the recent announcements by both OpenAI and Google regarding their somewhat divergent plans for their AI platforms (and specifically, purchases/bookings on their platforms), Amazon’s latest announcement was quite timely. This past week Amazon announced that Alexa Plus now has the ability to order food through Grubhub and Uber Eats. More importantly, according to the announcement, the new functionality (and supporting architecture) is intended to handle the full transaction from browsing to payment. So what about travel? According to the announcement, travel planning is one of several future possible uses of the new commerce architecture. For now, the pizza order and delivery functionality is limited to Echo devices with screens.
  • Six Weeks and One Hundred Million Dollars. Only six weeks after OpenAI’s commencement of an advertising pilot on its popular ChatGPT platform, OpenAI announced it had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue from the pilot. With that kind of immediate success, it is no surprise that OpenAI is rapidly building out its advertising infrastructure through recent hires and announced partnerships with Smartly and Criteo. Think advertising on popular AI platforms is a thing of the future? Think again.
  • What About Corporate and Managed Travel? Like so many others following the rapid rise of AI and its effects on travel, we’ve been largely focused on AI’s effects on leisure travel. What about corporate and managed travel? Changes are coming.
  • Hoteliers and Amadeus Obtain District Court’s Dismissal of Anti-Trust Case. This past week, an Illinois federal district court dismissed a proposed class action by guests alleging that hoteliers’ sharing of certain future occupancy information through Amadeus’ Demand360 product violated federal antitrust laws. The proposed class action was one of several similar cases brought over the past year or two against hoteliers, casino owners/operators and multi-family owners. Citing a Seventh Circuit decision, the Illinois court held that while the sharing of information can be evidence of an illegal conspiracy, sharing alone is not sufficient evidence of an actual agreement. For our law nerd readers, we’ve linked below the court’s opinion and dismissal order.

Have a great week everyone.