Google was recently fined 1.1 million euros by the French government because the hotel ratings shown in Google Maps use Google’s own standards instead of official data from the French tourism department.
As early as 2019, the French consumer and competition regulator DGCCRF received a series of complaints from consumers because Google used its own scoring system to rate hotels.
In France, the law requires that hotel ratings must be set by local tourism organizations according to standards. The scoring in Google Maps uses 1-5 stars, which is similar to the internationally accepted hotel star-rating standard, but the scoring is only derived from a proprietary algorithm, relying on customer reviews and other data for scoring.
This leads to the fact that when users utilize Google Maps to search, they can’t see the real hotel stars, but can only see Google’s own scoring system. There is a difference between the two. Google’s own ratings are currently applied to approximately 7,500 hotels worldwide.
After the French authorities launched an investigation, Google changed the star rating standard, but still failed to avoid being fined. Although 1.1 million euros is only a drop in the bucket for the Internet giant, Google was fined 4.34 billion euros in Europe in 2018 for using the Android system to promote its own apps.
