Hotel and holiday home platform Booking.com has been heavily criticised after it was revealed that people in Switzerland are being charged more for hotel rooms than those in other countries. Online VPN provider NordVPN found that prices on the website can be up to 27 percent higher when booking from Swiss cities and cantons compared to other places around the world.
According to the findings, reported by 20 Minuten, travellers booking trips on Booking.com from Switzerland are paying above and beyond. They found that when trying to book the same room in the same hotel using the same dates, prices on Booking.com are often much more expensive if the booker uses an internet connection in Switzerland.
The VPN provider cited the case of a stay at the Theatrino Hotel in Prague between April 22 and 28. If you had booked the holiday from Taiwan instead of Switzerland, you would have saved 68 francs or 8,7 percent on your bill. For a stay in the Hotel Banovani in Tbilisi, Georgia, Swiss travellers using a VPN connected to Georgia pay 27 percent less (177 francs) than if they had not used the VPN and officially booked from Switzerland.
20 Minuten itself was also able to find cases where using a VPN to book from other countries proved to be financially beneficial. For instance, a five-night stay at The Delphi in Amsterdam in May was 128 francs (8 percent) cheaper booking through the Netherlands than it was booking through Switzerland. They concluded that, in many cases, using a VPN to book holidays may be the financially savvy thing to do.
In a statement given to 20 Minuten, the Swiss Federal Price Monitor said it took the findings very seriously. “Clearly, the hotels in question are taking advantage of the fact that the Swiss are more willing to pay,” a spokesperson added. The organisation confirmed that it had notified the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs about the findings - 20 Minuten speculated that asking Swiss customers to pay more for identical rooms could break federal laws on unfair competition.
For their part, Booking.com wrote in a statement that it was difficult to make such comparisons, given that prices fluctuate continuously on their site. They said that hotels on their platform have “full control over their prices including discounts”, and that special deals, times of year and exchange rates all have an impact on how much hotels charge.