An accommodation search platform is sanctioned for misleading information

An Australian court ordered this Friday the accommodation search portal Trivagobased in Germany, to pay a millionaire fine for giving misleading information on hotel room rates between December 2016 and September 2019. The fine ordered by the Federal Court of Australia, which determined more than two years ago -in January 2020- that this technological multinational violated the Australian Consumer Law , is 44.7 million Australian dollars (32.8 million US dollars or 30.3 million euros), according to the ruling published today.

When announcing the sanction, Judge Mark Moshinsky explained that he considers it necessary “for the purposes of specific and general deterrence, to set penalties far outweigh benefits obtained by Trivago for its infringing conduct” in order to reflect the “seriousness of the infringements”. The magistrate noted that Trivago had proposed to pay “only half of the estimated damages suffered by consumers (approximately A$30 million ),” the judge specified, referring to an amount equivalent to about 22 million US dollars or 20 million euros.

Trivago, which was sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), misled consumers by saying it would help them quickly and easily find the best deals or rates available for a particular hotel, according to the consumer protection agency. In these cases, Trivago used an algorithm that gave significant weight to the online hotel booking sites that paid the highest rate. per click to have greater visibility on its portal, and therefore, the cheapest rates for consumers were often not shown, the ACCC explained today in a statement.

Trivago, which has the US-based Expedia as the majority shareholder, admitted that between December 2016 and September 2019 it received approximately 58 million Australian dollars (42.6 million US dollars or 39.3 million euros) in cost commissions for click for these supposedly misleading offers. The total amount of overpayments made by consumers between December 2016 and September 2019, which served to determine the fine, was about 38 million Australian dollars (about 28 million US dollars or 26 million euros), according to to ACCC calculations.