Bad Democrat

San Francisco is suing the owner of Kayak and Booking.com, saying that they are charging tourists too much to stay in hotels in the city. They allege that they did this by disguising their third party sites to look like websites of the hotel with which visitors are booking. The third party sites are named Book Online and Guest Reservations, with urls that change frequently. The holding company for Booking.com and Kayak provided those third-party websites with hotel inventory and payment systems, or in other words, used what Booking.com and Kayak did with their access to the hotels to make the third-party websites look like they were the hotels themselves. “These companies pretend to be real hotels, charge excessive markups, and trap people in bookings,” City Attorney David Chiu said on July 29.