Competitive benchmarking is under the regulatory microscope, even if the legal theory feels like a stretch to anyone who has actually run a hotel.
In the U.S., the major class-action suit against the big brands and STR (CoStar’s hotel benchmarking platform that compares metrics like price and occupancy across a set of competing hotels) was dismissed last August because, as most operators know, looking at anonymized historical data is not exactly a criminal conspiracy.
Across the pond, however, the UK’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority, Europe’s version of the U.S. antitrust regulators) has just launched its own investigation, eyeing Hilton, IHG, and Marriott for “reducing competitive uncertainty.”
While in the US, the DOJ is still riding high from its RealPage settlement in the rental housing market, these hotel cases are struggling because benchmarking is what we have done since the days of mystery shopping and manual phone trees. If analyzing last night’s ADR is a crime, then a lot of revenue managers in Hawaiʻi are going to need very expensive lawyers. Then again, STR is pretty basic and is also backward-looking. When AI pricing algorithms can do far more, will those tools start to look closer to price fixing or collusion?
Want to dive deeper? Check out the CMA’s official launch notice for the UK perspective.
