They wore the hotel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, October 7, 2026, Reuters\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201chotelname.bookonline.com,\u201d 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 \u201cis aware of the websites\u2019 deceptive practices, fails to prevent it, and directly profits from the scheme.\u201d Those are allegations, and the case is pending. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told Reuters in September: \u201cFor tens of millions of Americans, they don\u2019t notice until they\u2019ve checked out and they\u2019ve paid exorbitant fees.\u201d Laura Lee Blake of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association said she has made the mistake herself: \u201cIf someone who works in the hotel industry can make that mistake, imagine how easily the average traveler can be confused.\u201d And UNITE HERE Local 2 president Lizzy Tapia, in the city\u2019s July announcement, said \u201coften complaints fall on hotel workers who are left to fix problems they didn\u2019t create.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deb once booked a room in Duluth for Buck\u2019s card tournament on a page with the motel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s name. Another company \u2014 the parent of Priceline and Booking.com \u2014 supplies the rooms it sells, according to the city\u2019s suit. A search engine sells the top slot to whoever bids on the hotel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s storefront. I have heard that sentence from every company that ever sold the rope and disowned the knot. Disagreeing with the FTC\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s face, call the hotel.<\/p>\n
Sources:<\/strong> Reuters via MarketScreener, Oct. 7, 2026<\/a>; Reuters via U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 7, 2026<\/a>; PYMNTS\/CPI, Oct. 7, 2026<\/a>; San Francisco City Attorney, July 29, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Theo Ashford-Lindstr\u00f6m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reuters reports the FTC is gearing up to act against Booking Holdings over Guest Reservations, a third-party site whose ads look like hotels\u2019 own booking pages, with possible penalties above $500 million. San Francisco\u2019s pending suit alleges markups of up to 85% and says Booking supplied the rooms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-news"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/theo-booking-helping-you-book-1007pm.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}