San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sued Booking Holdings and two third-party operators, alleging they disguise booking sites as official hotel pages and add markups as high as 85%. The case turns on whether the $150B+ public company "knowingly" supplied the rails.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sued Booking Holdings and two third-party booking operators on Wednesday, July 29, alleging they run "scam" websites that pose as official hotel pages and quietly mark up room rates — by as much as 85% at the Palace Hotel, according to reporting from the SF Standard, which first reported the suit. NBC Bay Area and KRON4 put the markups across the platforms in a 35%-to-85% range.

The suit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, names Book Online and Guest Reservations as the front-end operators. Per the Standard's read of the complaint, the sites buy sponsored Google ads and register URLs that graft a hotel's name onto their own domain — the cited example is palacesanfrancisco.guestreservations.com — so a traveler thinks they're booking with the hotel directly, then faces higher rates and stricter refund terms. Chiu's office says the operators rotate their ads and URLs quickly, which is why the harm is hard to count.

The cap-table reality is why this is more than a nuisance suit. Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), which owns Kayak and Booking.com, is worth well north of $150 billion; the other two defendants are obscure. Chiu's theory, per the complaint, is that Booking Holdings "knowingly" supplied the room inventory and payment systems that make the alleged scheme run and profits on each booking — the knowledge element is what the case will turn on. A Booking Holdings spokesperson told the Standard the company takes consumer protection seriously and "believe[s] the lawsuit lacks merit." This isn't the company's first brush with the claim: in 2025 it paid $9.5 million to settle Texas Attorney General allegations of deceptive "junk fee" pricing.

Alex Bastian, CEO of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, backed the suit in the City Attorney's own release, saying the imposter sites "mislead travelers, damage the reputation of our hotels, and force hotel employees to spend valuable time and resources resolving problems they did not create."

The city seeks restitution for California consumers and civil penalties of $2,500 per violation against each company. What's still unquantified: how many hotels or travelers were hit, and a total dollar figure. And the SF Superior Court docket number hadn't surfaced in public databases as of Thursday — the first document to watch, along with whether Booking Holdings moves to sever itself from its two co-defendants.