Online hotel booking is about to get a whole lot less stressful.
What it means: An government department called the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) exists to make sure everyone's following the rules of business.
They'll intervene if they think a company is misleading customers, or a merger between two firms means customers will have less choice over what they buy (like they did in the whole Sainsbury's Asda case) – anything they think undermines fair competition, they'll call out.
Their next victim? Hotel booking sites. The CMA's not happy about the way they operate: particularly the misleading claims about how many other people are looking at the same room as you, and the shuffled search results based on how much commission that hotel pays the site.
They've got three months to change their practices or face heavy fines, the CMA says.
