bilboburgler

The economics of hotel usage is even more complicated. There are two income streams the hotel rooms and additional services, you can assume that customers of rooms will use restaurants 50% of the time, more room customers more restaurant usage where the real profits are on the drinks. Meanwhile hotels each have a usage rate that tells them when they make money. Most popular hotels set it at 70%, so every additional room filled more or less just hits the bottom line.

What Booking.com etc do is act a marketing function, to which the hotel has subcontracted its function. In the old days you paid for adverts in the papers, now you pay for it on the web, no real difference except customer comments hold your feet to the fire if you muck up.

Many people think that TripAdvisor have offered a false market in hotel information. I doubt it, what I have seen is hotel quality in Europe has improved greatly over the last 30 years