Trivago's own checkout grew 24x in a year. It is suing Google over exactly this.
Trivago's slide for investors now puts trivago among the top five sellers on trivago. The rooms in that checkout come from Expedia, which also owns the company.
by Markus Busch
The claim in court. Trivago is suing Google for damages, over Google placing its own hotel product above the comparison services it lists. The argument is one every hotelier knows from the other end. A platform that runs the ranking should not also be competing inside it. That fight has cost trivago €1.5 million in legal bills so far this year.
The same quarter, on its own site. Alongside the twenty-year click auction, trivago's last results carry a second business. A year ago it was worth €0.7 million. Last quarter, €17.0 million. It is trivago Book & Go, a checkout that lives inside trivago and runs through a subsidiary called trivago DEALS. Its slide for investors puts it among the top five sellers on the site.
Johannes Thomas, the chief executive, put it plainly. Book & Go is "one of the top players in our marketplace."
The auction is still nine-tenths of the company. The tenth that came out of nowhere is the tenth with a checkout in it.
The price comparison now lists trivago.
The costs of a seller. What Book & Go costs trivago to run tripled, to €8.4 million, and trivago says where the money went. Processing payments. Checking bookings. Answering customers. Those are the costs of taking a traveler's money and picking up the phone afterward. Trivago is also sitting on payments for stays that have not happened yet, the way you sit on a deposit. Twenty years of handing off the click, and now there is a till.
Where those rooms come from. Not from hotels. Thomas said in 2024 that the plan was to offer Book & Go to trivago's advertising partners, meaning OTAs, wholesalers and booking sites. The supply partner trivago named this quarter was Expedia, which also owns trivago. So if you sell through Expedia, your rooms can reach that checkout without anyone at trivago asking you. Whether they do is decided in your Expedia agreement, and trivago never has to ask.
Expedia's own spending says the same thing from the other side. Last quarter its brands paid for 28 percent of what trivago earned from clicks, down from 38 percent a year earlier. Booking did not move, at 37 percent. Expedia is paying less to win the click and more to be the room behind it.
Trivago draws the line itself. Its help pages tell travelers that trivago DEALS is a separate booking site run by a subsidiary. Trivago cannot manage or cancel the reservation. Two companies with the same name, and trivago is the one telling travelers to keep them apart. The comparison lists the seller. The seller is the comparison.
Trivago is asking a court to stop a platform from selling inside the results it runs. It is now one of the top five sellers inside its own.
Read also: Trivago takes Google to court over hotel search dominance · The OTA is not your competitor on Google
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