@Patricia55 But a hotel room is a private room, so there would have to be a sub-filter to exclude hotel rooms.
I would think that someone searching for a room would have the intelligence to reject the hotel rooms that come up in the search if he or she definitely does not want a hotel room. And that, over time, the algorithm would pick up on the choices guests are making by shifting more of the private rooms in the ranking.
My perspective comes from nearly 40 years working in book publishing. After Amazon arrived on the scene, many began referring to my business as "traditional" publishing and claimed "traditional" publishers would die. There was a lot of talk about how readers would buy a self-published book for 99 cents over a book published by a major publisher for $25.00. That hasn't happened (although deep discounting has happened). Representatives from Amazon came to my office and admitted that, within a very short period of time, readers realized that cheap self-published books were rarely worth the time it took to download them. They asked those of us from "traditional" publishing to help them put up higher quality books in their Kindle store.
Has Amazon impacted our business? Yes, in ways too numerous and complicated to explain here. Has it killed us? No. First Barnes & Noble (and British chains like Waterstone's) and then Amazon did force the closure of many independent booksellers, and that was a crisis. But independent bookselling is again on the rise. We've all had to adjust, there's no question about that. But we're still here.
Given hotels' overhead costs, I don't know how long they can cut their rates drastically. So I think the scary flood of competitive listings will settle down. In the meantime, some hosts will have to step up their game and some will decide to get out altogether. I feel I have no choice but to adapt and hang in there. But I like a challenge.
