If the hospitality industry cared enough it wouldn’t be hard to start their own “booking service” that didn’t have the flaws of Expedia and crew and gave the majority of the money back to the hotels. Upkeeping a website isn’t that hard.
Asking me not to compare prices and call the hotel directly on the phone so I can pay whatever price they feel like is similar to asking me to go back to horse and buggy. This booking sites didn’t spring up and become super popular because the old system was so good.
A service like this should be able to offer better prices than the competitors because it won’t have as much overhead of traditional booking sites. Or the new competition will drive the overhead of those competitors down, which is still a win for the hotels.
The hardest part will be finding someone to design the site who won’t make it horrible (so Hotels can’t use whatever service they previously used–all hotel websites are terrible), and they have to convince all of the middle managers to “leave the money on the table” and not jack up overhead rates wherever they can until they’re barely a percentage point or two cheaper than the existing sites, thus negating the entire purpose of the exercise.
That and it doesn’t fix the actual complaint here, which is not that booking sites are such vampires with their overhead, but because they enable customers to shop around too much and drive down profits.
