They wore the hotel’s name and called it helping you book. I know the sentence. It is what a middleman says when he has borrowed your face, rented a phone number in your area code, and marked up your room, and would like it noted that he was only being helpful.
On Wednesday, October 7, 2026, Reuters’ Jody Godoy and Doyinsola Oladipo reported that the Federal Trade Commission is gearing up to take action against Booking Holdings, the owner of Priceline, over online ads that appear to send travelers to a hotel’s own site but in reality send them to a third-party site where they are often charged extra, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The FTC has been looking into Booking’s relationship with Guest Reservations, a third-party website that advertises stays at specific hotels; one source said the case could carry more than $500 million in potential penalties. The agency is weighing whether Guest Reservations’ websites, which often charge higher prices and fees, violate a rule against impersonating other businesses. Guest Reservations has drawn more than 1,000 consumer complaints to the Better Business Bureau, Reuters reports, many from people who believed they were booking directly with hotels and then met surprise fees and unresponsive customer service. Booking supplies hotel room inventory to Guest Reservations through Priceline Partner Solutions, according to an ongoing lawsuit filed by San Francisco. Guest Reservations’ site says it uses hotel trademarks or information only to help customers book rooms. A Priceline spokesperson declined to comment; an FTC spokesperson confirmed the investigation. PYMNTS, summarizing Booking’s filings, reports that FTC staff notified Priceline in July of plans to recommend a complaint involving Priceline and one of its business-to-business partners over disclosures, fees, billing and customer service, and that the company says it disagrees with the FTC’s position and has been discussing a possible resolution. The San Francisco suit, filed July 29 by City Attorney David Chiu on behalf of the People of the State of California, alleges that GuestReservations.com and BookOnline.com have, since about 2022, bought search ads to land atop hotel-specific results, built portals that replicate authentic hotel booking pages under addresses shaped like “hotelname.bookonline.com,” listed phone numbers with area codes local to the hotel, and overcharged travelers by up to 85 percent, typically for full prepayment and often nonrefundable. The city counts more than 1,800 BBB complaints against the two sites and alleges Booking Holdings “is aware of the websites’ deceptive practices, fails to prevent it, and directly profits from the scheme.” Those are allegations, and the case is pending. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told Reuters in September: “For tens of millions of Americans, they don’t notice until they’ve checked out and they’ve paid exorbitant fees.” Laura Lee Blake of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association said she has made the mistake herself: “If someone who works in the hotel industry can make that mistake, imagine how easily the average traveler can be confused.” And UNITE HERE Local 2 president Lizzy Tapia, in the city’s July announcement, said “often complaints fall on hotel workers who are left to fix problems they didn’t create.”
Deb once booked a room in Duluth for Buck’s card tournament on a page with the motel’s name across the top, paid in full, and arrived to find that the night clerk had never heard of her. Buck slept in the truck and still calls it the best hand he played all weekend. I love them. They are seasoning.
Helping you book is the alibi. The costume is the business model. Sit with the arrangement until it confesses, because the arrangement is the whole story. One company wears the hotel’s name. Another company — the parent of Priceline and Booking.com — supplies the rooms it sells, according to the city’s suit. A search engine sells the top slot to whoever bids on the hotel’s own name. Every link in that chain takes a cut, and the only party who never agreed to any of it is the person typing a hotel’s name into a box because she wanted the hotel. That is not a glitch in the market. That is the market doing exactly what it is shaped to do: find the moment of trust and stand in it holding a card reader. The firm will say it is a supplier, a pipe, a wholesaler of inventory, and that what happens at the end of the pipe is somebody else’s storefront. I have heard that sentence from every company that ever sold the rope and disowned the knot. Disagreeing with the FTC’s position is not the same thing as not knowing. And I am not crowning the agency. Reuters notes it has kept its focus on the cost of living as the president’s approval rating sits at all-time lows, and consumer protection on a campaign calendar is still a calendar; a city attorney filed in July, and the complaints were piling up at the Better Business Bureau long before that. Nor am I weeping for the big hotel chains, which have spent years pushing guests to book direct so they can skip the commission while still leaning on the aggregators for business. They declined to comment, which may be the most honest thing anyone said. The people who actually pay for this are the front-desk clerks absorbing the shouting and the travelers who found out at checkout. I am keeping the cardigan. Fill the notebook. And the next time a page wears a hotel’s face, call the hotel.
Sources: Reuters via MarketScreener, Oct. 7, 2026; Reuters via U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 7, 2026; PYMNTS/CPI, Oct. 7, 2026; San Francisco City Attorney, July 29, 2026.
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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