Image Credit, Rodrigo Salomón Cañas
What is happening right now in the hotel and online booking industry in Canada should alarm every traveller, every family, every small business, and frankly every regulator in the country. This is not about minor inconveniences or the occasional pricing glitch. This is about systemic, deceptive practices that have quietly become normalized, practices that would raise immediate red flags in almost any other consumer-facing industry. The longer this goes unchallenged, the more Canadians are being conditioned to accept behaviour that looks less like hospitality and more like legalized bait-and-switch.
Start with the most common experience Canadians now have when booking a hotel online. You search for a room. You enter your dates. You see a price. It looks reasonable. It is clearly presented. It feels like a quote. You click on it, believing you are moving one step closer to confirming that price. Then, almost instantly, that price evaporates. The total jumps. Sometimes it creeps up by ten or twenty percent. Other times it explodes by thirty, forty, even fifty percent. The explanation, if one is offered at all, is buried in vague language about fees, taxes, conversion rates, or “updated availability.” But the reality is much simpler and much uglier. The price that drew you in was never the price you were meant to pay.
Even worse, many Canadians do not realize that when they reach the checkout page, they are no longer dealing with a Canadian...
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