AMOMA Is Dead, Long Live To Rate Leakage!
It's official: AMOMA filed for bankruptcy and terminated all of its activities, "with immediate effect."
The official reason, ironically enough, would rely on metasearch engines' shady business practices: on its website, in fact, AMOMA accuses "price comparators" to be nothing else than media agencies, "owned by companies operating in the same segment," leading to a "negative impact on free competition." These comparators, the company continues, "unilaterally impose unsustainable financial conditions," in a Darwinian law of the fittest, where "only a very small circle of majors Online Travel Agencies can survive."
Most hotels will sigh with relief, as AMOMA is infamously known for undercutting hotel rates and/or distributing net wholesale prices, yet the battle for rate parity is far from won.
HotelBeds, for instance, already reduced its business with AMOMA to a slight 1% of all of its sales, and you've likely caught distributors such as Nustay, FindHotel, ZenHotels.com, Otel.com, and ebookers already following AMOMA's dirty footprints.
So, what will change? I'd bet that nothing will. Because the problem is not AMOMA, nor booking.basic, nor Expedia Add-Ons: these are only its manifestations. The real obstacle is the current, over-two-decade-old room distribution ecosystem, that relies (almost) entirely on cached, mutable, and modifiable data: until we fix distribution at its source (yup, talkin' 'bout blockchain distribution), AMOMA filing for bankruptcy won't make any real difference.
Please prove me wrong.
