Using popular booking sites may help you find the best price for a hotel room, but are they actually influencing your decision in ways that don’t just involve dollar signs? According to the Wall Street Journal, yes, they could be. The order in which hotels appear on travel-booking sites can vary based on a number of factors, including the hotel’s conversion rate — the number of users who make a reservation after looking at its listings — customer ratings and even the quality of the photos showing the property.

Expedia, for example, lists hotels that have been more positively reviewed by customers higher in the search results than properties that have elicited complaints from Expedia users. If a hotel is overbooked and guests are bumped (or “walked,” in hotel parlance) to another property, that can push it down a few pages too. Expedia Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi told the Journal:

“To the extent we see the experience being poor or a significant amount of walks, we will penalize the hotel in sort order. Different consumers have different needs. A hotel that provides that service or location deserves to have a higher sort order.”

It’s completely unsurprising that these sites would prioritize the hotels with the highest conversion rates. As the Journal points out, the sites receive a commission from hotels after a room is booked. Priceline has admitted that it relies heavily on conversion rate percentages to determine how the hotels are ordered in search results. Its default search ranking is currently labeled as “most popular,” but that terminology is periodically changed. Booking.com uses “preferred” and Expedia uses “recommended.” When travelers chose their own listing preferences, they sort them based on review scores.

Obviously, the hotels themselves aren’t thrilled about these subtle manipulations. Maryam Cope, the vice president of government affairs for the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said:

“Biased or misleading search results from these sites or via web searches can be highly problematic, particularly on those booking websites that purport to be helping consumers comparison shop based off of less than objective information.”

But unless you’re selecting your next hotel room based only on price, it’s all less than objective. Even the star rating system is suspect, because there are so many different systems for rating hotels, with different criteria for different booking sites, guidebooks and the guests themselves. And although crisp photos of an in-room television or hotel gym might guarantee a booking for one potential guest, it might not do a thing for another.

If you’re trying to find The Ultimate Hotel at the best price, the easiest thing to do is probably to click on each possible sorting method, from popularity to price to user and website recommendations, and see what options appear on the first few pages. Or, you can always try to crowdsource suggestions from your friends and social media followers. That way, at least you’ll have someone else to blame if you have a sub-optimal stay or if you find a stranger’s hair carefully woven around a bar of soap.

Source: http://roadwarriorvoices.com/2016/01/29/do-hotel-booking-sites-manipulate-their-search-results/?t=head