Google's DMA Compliance Changes Cut European Direct-Booking Clicks by Up to 30%

European hotels have seen free direct-booking clicks from Google fall by up to 30% since the company adjusted its search results to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, according to Cayuga Hospitality Consultants. Comparison sites now rank higher in results, and Google’s hotel unit lost pricing-display features that previously routed traffic straight to a property’s own site — meaning hotels now have to pay for advertising to recover visibility that used to arrive for free.

The timing sharpens an argument the industry has been circling for months: is first-party guest data collection even achievable at the scale hotel strategy assumes? A recent World Panel debate raised the question directly, and it connects to two data points already in circulation. Natalie Kimball of Shiji Horizon Distribution has warned that as Google’s AI Mode booking rolls out, “discovery, comparison and transaction are starting to collapse into one conversation” — with Booking.com, Expedia, and Hotels.com already integrated as OTA partners, giving them a structural head start hotels don’t have. And GuestCentric’s own research found that even among the direct traffic hotels do keep, 56% of engaged website visitors show high booking intent, yet 98% still abandon before completing a purchase — a conversion problem that exists independent of the click-volume decline.

Not every counter-move in this space is AI-driven. The Broadmoor generated nearly $1 million in direct revenue over three months purely through its reservations team calling back guests whose inquiries hadn’t converted — a low-tech result that’s a useful check on how much of hospitality’s distribution problem is actually solvable with more technology versus more follow-through. The DMA change makes the free-traffic assumption behind a lot of direct-booking strategy look shakier than it did a year ago; whether the fix is AI-mediated discovery, better data capture, or just picking up the phone probably depends more on which lever a given property has actually been pulling.