Duff on Hospitality Law

Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . .  Our Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, February 28, 2025, is below. This week’s Update features a variety of stories from a variety of sources, including some new sources. It is often easy to rely on the industry pillars – Phocus Wire and Skift – both of which do an amazing job of covering the travel world. As our Update continues to evolve, we will continue to look for new sources, new perspectives and new opinions on the stories we believe are most relevant to our readers, including a few perspectives from resources in my own backyard here in Seattle.   

For those of you interested, we are attaching a copy of the transcript from Tripadvisor’s recent earnings release call.  As I noted in last week’s Update, Tripadvisor CEO, Matt Goldberg, used the call to share some interesting details on Tripadvisor’s recently announced partnership with generative AI platform, Perplexity, as well as its collaborations with other AI platforms. 

Enjoy.

• • Another Year and Another Record Broken on Annual OTA Marketing Investments.  Every year we seem to feature the same story.  Another year and another OTA annual marketing spend record is broken.  According to recent financial reporting, Trip.com, Airbnb, Booking Holdings and Expedia Group spent a combined $17.8 billion on marketing during 2024, an increase of a billion dollars over 2023 amounts. 
    
    
  • Amazon Unveils Alexa+.  This past week, Amazon unveiled its latest iteration of its well-known voice assistant, Alexa.  Alexa+ combines the voice assistant with, you guessed it, generative AI, to produce “free flowing conversations.”  Although the many demonstrations circulated online (as least those that I saw) did not feature travel (they did include booking online restaurant reservations), Amazon claims that the new AI enabled assistant will be able to book travel for users and announced that it was launching the new service with travel partners, Booking Holdings, TripAdvisor, Uber and Fodor’s.  The service will start rolling out across the U.S. in the weeks ahead and Amazon Prime members will receive free access to the new assistant.

• • AH&LA Supports Re-Introduction of Federal Junk Fees Legislation.  This past week saw the re-introduction of junk fees legislation in both the U.S. House and Senate.  AH&LA issued statements supporting the legislation.  You may ask why federal legislation is needed at this point with the FTC’s junk fees rule is scheduled to take effect in May.  In one word, pre-emption.  The FTC’s rule does not pre-empt similar junk fee efforts at the state level and allows states to freely adopt their own more restrictive (and often inconsistent) rules. 
    
    
  • Will the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) Be Enforced Against U.S. Companies?  The last few stories in this week’s Update focuses on questions arising in Washington D.C. among President Trump and Republican law makers regarding the EU’s allegedly “select” enforcement of the DMA and DSA against U.S. technology companies.  The effort gained momentum last week with President Trump’s issuance of a new Executive Order stating, among other things, that regulations (like the EU’s DMA and DSA) will “face scrutiny from the Administration,” and U.S. Representative Jim Jordan’s letter to EU Commissioner Teresa Ribera asking her to clarify the DMA’s rules. (In each case, echoing the concerns of U.S. tech companies designated under the DMA as “gatekeepers”).  These concerns come as the EU Commission is reportedly poised to issue fines against Google for its failure to comply with the DMA.  What does this mean for hoteliers hoping to see meaningful EU mandated changes from Booking.com?  Will the fear of retaliatory tariffs convince EU regulators to limit or prevent their enforcement of these new rules against U.S. companies like Booking Holdings?  Like so much these days, no one knows.

Have a great week everyone.