Google is going to have to checkout.
The Californian giant will spend 1.1 million euros for having awarded its own stars to French hotels until September 2019, using an algorithm created from scratch.
However, in the country, the rating of hotels is supervised by Atout France, a tourist development agency under State control.
Made aware of these practices by the General Directorate for Competition, Consumption and Fraud Control (DGCCRF), the Paris public prosecutor therefore found Google responsible for a
"deceptive commercial practice"
and put the company fined.
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"
An investigation by the Directorate General for Competition, Consumption and the Repression of Fraud (DGCCRF), initiated in 2019, has demonstrated the misleading nature of the ranking of hotels by Google, in particular on its search engine,"
writes the DGCCRF in a press release.
The companies Google Ireland Ltd and Google France corrected their practices and, after the agreement of the public prosecutor of Paris, agreed to pay a fine of 1.1 million euros as part of a criminal transaction.
"
Misleading classification
The DGCCRF had been seized by several complaints from hoteliers, who denounced a
"posting on Google of a misleading classification of tourist accommodation
".
This is not the average rating given to hotels by Google users, a rating that appears first when an Internet user searches for an establishment on the search engine.
This note still exists today and obviously does not correspond to the official classification.
On the other hand, once arrived on the Google page of a hotel, the Net surfer sees a mention “X-star tourist hotel”.
It is this mention that earned Google a fine for having until September 2019 “
substituted for the Atout France classification a classification established according to its own criteria
”.
According to Google, which details this classification on this page, this algorithm took into account various sources including returns from third-party partners or hoteliers, searches made on Google and the aggregation of hotel characteristics such as price, location or the size of the rooms.
To carry out its investigation, the DGCCRF had compared these “Google stars” to the official ratings of Atout France in more than 7,500 establishments in the country, and according to it, this classification lends itself “
greatly to confusion
” by its presentation and by
“the use identical to the term 'stars' on the same scale from 1 to 5, to classify tourist accommodation ”.
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“This practice was particularly damaging for consumers, misled about the level of services they could expect when booking accommodation,”
continues the DGCCRF.
This also resulted in prejudice for hoteliers whose establishments were wrongly presented as lower ranked than in the official classification of Atout France. "
In 2020, the DGCCRF had therefore transmitted to the Paris prosecutor's office the conclusions of its investigation, and the latter had "
proposed to the companies Google Ireland Ltd and Google France a transaction including the payment of the sum of 1.1 million euros
" .
Fine accepted by Google, which had therefore already changed these practices after the start of the investigation in September 2019.