What Booking.com Did to Hotels, Find It Is Doing to Your Local Shops
· Admin
One platform changed how an entire industry operated. The same thing is happening in retail — just a few decades later.
In the late 1990s, the hotel industry had a problem that benefited hotels enormously and frustrated travellers completely: there was no easy way to compare prices across properties. You called a hotel, got a quote, and accepted it or didn't. You booked through a travel agent who had relationships with certain chains. You paid what you were told, and assumed it was fair.
Then came Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, and a cluster of competitors. Prices became visible. Comparison became instant. The industry changed — dramatically, irreversibly, and ultimately for the better for both consumers and, counterintuitively, many of the hotels themselves.
Australian retail is now at the same inflection point. And the parallels are closer than most people realise.
What the Travel Revolution Actually Achieved
The economic impact of hotel and travel comparison platforms is now thoroughly documented.
Oxford Economics research cited by Booking Holdings found that Online Travel Agencies saved consumers approximately $158 billion globally between 2019 and 2021 alone. These savings were not the result of platforms artificially lowering prices — they were the result of transparency making the cheapest option visible and accessible, allowing consumers to choose it.
Beyond money: the same research found that more than two-thirds of consumers believed these platforms saved them two or more hours in the planning and booking process. Time savings at scale are significant economic value, even if they don't show up in a transaction record.
The ACCC has been engaged in this space, too: in 2020, the Federal Court found that Trivago had misled Australian consumers about how its rankings worked — specifically, that listings appearing as the "best price" were in fact heavily influenced by which booking sites paid the highest fees. The lesson is not that comparison platforms are inherently problematic. It's that transparency about how they rank results is non-negotiable for consumer trust.
The Hotel Industry's Initial Resistance — and What Happened Next
Hotels fought the comparison platforms initially. Some blocked their inventory from aggregators. Others tried to create "loyalty" programmes that incentivised direct booking and made direct prices artificially competitive. Some lobbied regulators to limit what aggregators could show.
None of it worked long-term — because the consumer demand for transparent comparison was stronger than any industry's ability to resist it.
What actually happened is interesting: many hotels ultimately benefited from being listed on comparison platforms. The "Billboard Effect" — documented in academic research — describes how a hotel listed on a major comparison site often received more direct bookings as a result, because visibility created awareness and trust that translated into customers going directly to the hotel's own site for their next booking.
A similar dynamic can emerge in local retail. Retailers who appear in Find It results — with prices, availability cues, and proximity information — can reach customers who might otherwise not have considered them. Always confirm price and stock with the retailer before you buy.
Australian Retail's Specific Problem
Australian retail has a version of the old hotel problem: significant price variation between retailers selling identical products, with no easy consumer mechanism to see the variation before committing to a purchase.
A 65-inch television. A Dyson cordless vacuum. A KitchenAid stand mixer. These are not ambiguous products with quality variation that might justify price differences. They are identical, often down to the serial number. Yet the same model routinely appears at meaningfully different prices across Kmart, Target, Big W, Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, and The Good Guys — sometimes within walking distance of each other.
For decades, the friction of comparison has been the industry's most reliable protection against consumer price sensitivity. Checking six retailers took most of a day. Nobody did it. Retailers priced accordingly.
What Find It Changes
Find It is built on the simple observation that the friction argument is no longer valid.
Comparing prices across a growing set of Australian retailers can take seconds. Checking local availability cues takes the same amount of time. Finding a nearby store with a competitive price, and whether click and collect or delivery looks faster, is a single search — then confirm with the retailer.
The model is analogous to what Booking.com did for hotels:
- Aggregate pricing from multiple sources in one place
- Display results sorted by the factors that matter to the consumer
- Show proximity alongside price, because location is a real cost
- Be transparent about how results are ranked — see How we compare
Where the travel revolution took 15 years to fully reshape consumer behaviour, local retail comparison has the advantage of a consumer base that already understands and trusts the model — from travel, from energy comparison, from insurance aggregators.
The Retail Industry's Inflection Point
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been watching retail pricing practices closely. Its 2024–25 supermarket inquiry highlighted what it described as a systemic lack of price transparency and an imbalance of information between retailers and consumers.
The solution it consistently advocates — across energy, telecommunications, financial services, and now retail — is independent, transparent comparison. Not price-fixing. Not government-mandated pricing. Just access to information.
That's what Find It aims to provide. And if the hotel industry's experience is any guide, both consumers and retailers can benefit from better transparency — even if the journey feels disruptive at first.
The revolution in travel pricing took 15 years. In local retail, comparison tools like Find It are part of that same shift starting now.
Find It is a free shopping comparison helper covering a growing set of Australian retailers. See How we compare for ranking and commercial disclosure. Always confirm with the retailer before you buy.