Expedia vs. InterContinental

He is right about retailers, but most consumers don't view travel agents as retailers. Consumers hire travel agents as their representatives to search the best deals from all the options out there. To the extent that certain options are off limits, I believe the travel agent becomes less effective.

Discount airlines like Southwest and JetBlue already shun the big online travel agencies, and now Expedia and its sister company, Hotels.com, are about to lose access to the largest hotel company in the world.

InterContinental Hotels Group, which operates chains under the Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, and InterContinental names, is preparing to pull nearly all its 3,500 hotels off the two websites because they refuse to comply with business guidelines it issued last spring. The split is scheduled to take place Nov. 15.

Among other things, InterContinental's guidelines require websites to break out their tax and service charges, rather than lumping them together in a way that makes it impossible for consumers to know how much of each they are paying.

McArthur said consumers don't care how much they pay in taxes and how much they pay in fees. All they care about, he says, is how much they pay overall and whether that overall rate is competitive.

''If there was any evidence that consumers cared about this, we would take it more seriously," McArthur said. ''This is a red herring. . . . This is not a consumer issue. This is a competitive issue."

McArthur contended InterContinental abruptly halted negotiations with Expedia and announced it was pulling its rooms off the website because it wants to steer more consumers to its own website. He said most hotel chains have provisions in their contracts prohibiting Expedia from breaking out their taxes and fees.

''InterContinental's position is the outlier in the industry," he said.

Tom Seddon, a senior vice president with InterContinental, said it is true that he would like to cut out middlemen as much as possible and steer consumers directly to InterContinental's own website. But he claimed that was not the motivation behind the company's guidelines.