Google had established a "misleading classification" of hotels in France, substituting a classification established according to its own criteria for the official one ranging from one to five stars.
The hotel sector, in great difficulty due to the health crisis, did not need this.
The American giant was fined one million euros, the Repression of Fraud announced on Monday.
Launched in 2019, an investigation by the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumption and the Repression of Fraud “demonstrated the misleading nature of the ranking of hotels by Google, in particular on its search engine”, explains a press release. of the DGCCRF.
As a result, "the companies Google Ireland and Google France have corrected their practices and, after agreement with the Paris public prosecutor, have agreed to pay a fine of € 1.1 million in the context of a criminal transaction".
A classification "established according to its own criteria"
The DGCCRF had received "complaints from hoteliers denouncing the posting on Google of a misleading classification of tourist accommodation".
As a result, it "checked in 2019 and 2020 the nature and fairness of the information provided by the platform".
The rankings of more than 7,500 establishments were compared, "on a significant number of cases", to "the only official classification existing in France and issued by Atout France", ranging from one to five stars.
It thus appeared that Google "had substituted for the Atout France classification a classification established according to its own criteria", which "was greatly confused by its presentation and by the identical use of the term + stars +, according to the same scale ranging from one to five, to classify tourist accommodation ”.
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This practice, "particularly harmful for consumers, deceived as to the level of services which they could expect" by reserving accommodation, was also detrimental to hoteliers "whose establishments were wrongly presented as lower classified than in the official classification. d'Atout France ”, says the DGCCRF.
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Believing that this "constituted a deceptive commercial practice", the DGCCRF transmitted the conclusions of its investigations to the Paris prosecutor's office, which resulted in a transaction.
Google now uses the official ranking issued by Atout France since September 2019.
