The online hotel bookings business is a lucrative one for fraud, but it is fraud of a very insidious nature: The major hotel brands are losing billions of dollars a year, and much of this business is being snapped up by their own legitimate online travel agents who get to the customer first through a variety of ploys. It is surprising how these agents can game the paid search results and squat on a variety of domain names that misrepresent themselves, with almost 360 million visits being diverted from the hotels’ own sites.

You can download the report (after registering) here that I did for Markmonitor.