Content Marketer

Guneet Lamba

Guneet Lamba does content and SEO at PriceLabs, where she writes about dynamic pricing, revenue management, and how operators actually run their portfolios. Her work appears across the PriceLabs blog and Rental Scale-Up.

Articles by Guneet Lamba

The government published the table. Guaranteed hours is the cheapest of the three rights in every scenario.

employment law, competition law, licensing, United Kingdom

The UK's zero hours reform costs hotels more in shift notice than in guaranteed hours. That is the government's own figure.

The government published its costing of the zero hours reforms on 12 August 2026. The headline everyone quoted, £2.9 billion a year, is the top of a range starting at £350 million. Inside the range, the right to reasonable notice of shifts costs employers more than the right to guaranteed hours in every scenario modelled. The rota is the expensive part, not the contract.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 22 · 5 min read

The filing says where it went. Part of it is buying guests for independent hotels.

Airbnb, direct booking, channel mix, commission, SEC filings

Airbnb's marketing spend hit $1.6 billion in six months. Part of it now buys guests for independent hotels.

Airbnb spent $1,626 million on sales and marketing in the first half of 2026, against $1,254 million a year earlier, while revenue grew less than half as fast. The company's own quarterly filing says the money went to emerging markets and partnerships. Its shareholder letter says one of those partnerships is a subsidised push to put boutique and independent hotels on the platform.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 21 · 5 min read

Airbnb added thousands of boutique and independent hotels across more than 20 destinations in the quarter. S

Airbnb, commission, direct booking, channel mix, OTA payments, primary sources

Airbnb's hotel nights grew three times faster than its homes. In the same quarter it started charging some hosts 6% instead of 15.5%.

Airbnb told shareholders in August that hotel nights booked grew roughly three times as fast as its homes business, while conceding hotels remain a single-digit share of nights. Days later it began piloting reduced fees of 6% or 10%, against a company average of 16%, for hosts who bring their own guests through shareable links. Both moves price the same thing: who produced the customer.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 18

Vrbo Sponsored Listings and the vacation rental comp set

Expedia Group, Airbnb, direct booking, channel mix, commission, rate strategy, primary sources

Vrbo just added non-refundable rates, same-day booking and paid placement. It is teaching a holiday let to behave like a hotel.

Expedia Group announced 12 new products for Vrbo and Escapia on 1 September 2026. Sponsored Listings went global on a pay-per-booked-night auction. Vrbo homes are becoming bookable inside Expedia packages. The list also adds same-day bookings, non-refundable rates, tighter cancellation windows and digital welcome guides. Every one of those is a hotel feature, and the target is professional managers rather than casual hosts.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 17

Figures reported by Google after its December 2024 test in Germany, Belgium and Estonia. Google produced them during an open investigation, has not published the method, and no independent party has verified them.

Google, Digital Markets Act, European Commission, direct booking, OTA, competition law, primary sources

Google built independent hotels their own unit in European search. It only appears when an online travel agency's unit appears first.

Google rebuilt its European search results on 8 September 2026 under a €460 million non-compliance decision and published the documentation the same day. Direct suppliers, including individual hotels, get a dedicated unit that costs them no feed work. Google's own page states it appears only when the aggregator unit appears. An independent's free placement is now conditional on an online travel agency showing up first.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 17

Brussels set a score of eight before a city can touch short-term rentals

European Commission, short-term rental regulation, licensing, planning, Airbnb, primary sources

Brussels set a price-to-income score of eight before a city can touch short-term rentals, and none of it reaches the rules Barcelona already has

The European Commission proposed the Affordable Housing Act on 9 September 2026. Before a city can restrict short-term rentals it has to show a price-to-income ratio of at least eight, a rising trend over ten years, and three years of evidence that letting caused the harm. The restriction then expires after five years. Hosts letting their own home are excluded, and existing city rules sit outside the text entirely.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 16

Your corporate rate now depends on an AI matching your room to the right listing.

AI search, connectivity, channel mix, Booking.com, Expedia Group, direct booking, primary sources

Navan merged 2.6 million properties into one catalogue. Your corporate rate now has to survive being matched to the right room.

Navan says its platform carries 2.6 million properties drawn from Sabre and Amadeus, from Expedia, Booking.com and MakeMyTrip, and from direct connections with hotel brands. The same room arrived through several of those feeds with conflicting descriptions, and travellers were reaching properties to find rooms that looked nothing like the listing. Navan's fix is an AI mapper that merges them into one verified entry, and room rate options rose 70%.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 15

AI travel agents hotel pricing, dynamic packaging hotels, online travel agency margin extraction, guest data disparity

AI Hotel Booking Agents Mirror European Dynamic Packaging Precedent

A new industry theory suggests AI booking agents will read guest urgency signals to mark up room prices in real time. The hotel receives its listed rate while the platform pockets the premium. This mechanism mirrors the margin extraction seen in European dynamic packaging over the last decade. Operators are adapting by treating direct channels as the only way to retain pricing control over their own inventory.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 15

TikTok did not make them. Creators did, for commission, on a property that cannot be booked there.

AI search, guest-facing content, hotel marketing, brand accuracy, Expedia Group, Booking.com, original research

Seventeen AI videos sold suites a Sedona resort does not have. TikTok did not make them, and the resort was not bookable on TikTok at all.

Skift ran videos of the Ambiente Sedona through a detection tool and found 17 flagged as AI-generated at 80% confidence or higher. They showed an atrium suite that does not exist and a pond that is not there, and one sold the 40-room adults-only resort as family-friendly. One had 315,000 views. The videos carried booking commission tags. The property cannot be booked on TikTok.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 14

business rates, UK hospitality, Spain VAT, short-term rental regulation, tourist tax, competitive distortion, European Commission

The UK gave pubs another 20% business rates discount. Spain just hiked tax on hotel competitors to 21%.

The UK government announced a 20% business rates cut for pubs in July 2026, building on a 15% relief from January. Hotels were excluded from both. The selective relief creates a local distortion where hotels pay thousands more than pubs competing for the same food and beverage revenue. Spain took the opposite approach in June, targeting short-term rentals with a 21% value-added tax while keeping hotels at a protected 10%.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 14

AI assistants repeated a hotel's own incorrect history

AI search, brand accuracy, hotel marketing, structured data, Eurostars Langford, original research, guest-facing content

Three of four AI assistants told us a Miami hotel was the former Miami National Bank. The city's own designation report says otherwise.

Three of four AI assistants described Eurostars Langford as the former Miami National Bank in Beaux-Arts style. Miami's 1988 designation report names the building City National Bank and the style Neo-Classical, and the original 1926 tenant was Miami Bank and Trust. All three assistants were repeating the hotel's own marketing copy. One assistant also advertised a rooftop bar that has been shut.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 11

Google, AI Mode, agentic booking, free booking links, direct booking, OTA, Booking Holdings, DMA

Google's hotel booking agent launched with 10 partners. Its flight tab runs on more than 300.

Google put hotel booking inside AI Mode on 27 August 2026 with ten launch partners, every one an online travel agency or a chain. In the same announcement, flight price tracking drew on more than 300 partner airlines and travel sites. Independent hotels can still surface in Google with their own direct rate. What they cannot carry is the button that completes the booking.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 10 · 4 min read

We ran the same query four times. The lists barely overlapped, and that changes what optimising means.

AI search, AI recommendations, hotel discovery, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, original research, Miami

Four AI assistants named 30 boutique hotels in Miami. Exactly one appeared on all four lists.

Four AI assistants named 30 boutique hotels in Miami. Exactly one appeared on all four lists. On a second query about independent hotels near a named landmark, 11 properties came back and none were unanimous. The concentration operators have been warned about did not appear. Fragmentation did, and it means there is no single set of AI results to optimise for.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 9 · 4 min read

booking.com merchant model

Booking.com is holding $10.1 billion of traveller cash. Almost none of it is a late payment.

Booking Holdings held $10.1 billion of traveller cash on 30 June 2026, up from $5.3 billion on 31 December 2025. Expedia Group held $15.4 billion. The balance moves with booking lead time, not payout speed, which means the advance-purchase rates hotels have spent a decade optimising are the mechanism that builds it.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 8 · 5 min read

google eu hotel search changes

Google already ran this experiment. It reported that hotels lost more than 10% of traffic and intermediaries lost almost none.

Google rebuilt its European search results on 8 September 2026 under a €460 million non-compliance decision. In late 2024 it had already tested stripping hotel features in three EU markets and published the outcome: hotel traffic down more than 10%, intermediary traffic broadly flat. That asymmetry is the number to watch, and the only party who has measured it is Google.

By Guneet Lamba · Sep 7 · 8 min read

Booking.com's own factsheet counts 32 million-plus structured listings. Most independent-hotel websites have three pages.

Distribution

Cvent says 94% of hotels never appear in AI answers. The company publishing the number also sells the listing tier that fixes it.

Cvent reports that 94% of hotels fail to appear in AI search results, and that 75% of event planners now use AI while sourcing venues. Its analysis of roughly 6,000 listings found its own top-tier properties 50% more likely to be cited than basic ones. The mechanism being blamed for the gap, a cost cap on how many searches an assistant runs, is not documented anywhere.

By Guneet Lamba · Aug 14 · 5 min read

The same £100 net rate can be resold at two different markups, and the hotel sees neither difference.

Booking.com, Expedia Group, merchant model, channel mix, connectivity, SEC filings, primary sources, direct booking

Agoda's own page says hotel net rate wholesale is a switch you turn on, and it lists the 70,000 partners sitting behind it

Agoda publishes a hotel-facing page for its business-to-business product. It describes an opt-in a property activates with its own hotel ID, a portal reporting rate distribution and production by partner, and a network of more than 70,000 affiliates, more than 380 airlines, more than 200 banks and more than 100 bedbanks. The August version of this piece said the channel ran without the hotel's visibility or consent. That was wrong on both counts.

By Guneet Lamba · Aug 11 · 4 min read

Room revenue in the UK and US is up, but profit margins are not.

News

Card commissions are the fastest-growing line in the European hotel P&L, and Southern Eu

HotStats reports credit card commissions up 7.9% across EMEA, more than double revenue growth and the fastest-growing line in the profit and loss account, with loyalty programme spend up 5.1%. In Southern Europe, the region carrying the continent's average, profit per room dipped in July while revenue climbed. In the Middle East each 1% of revenue decline is costing 1.5 to 2 times that in profit.

By Guneet Lamba · Jul 29