Source: Sharecast
Co-Star is a real estate firm that owns the data analytics tool STR. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was investigating whether the quartet colluded over pricing by sharing information by using the product to make commercial decisions.
The three chains operate more than 25,000 hotels globally. STR tracks data performance data from over 90,000 hotels worldwide, allowing individual properties to compare their performance against a "competitive set" of similar properties.
It measures the percentage of available rooms sold, the average price paid and the revenue per available room - key industry metric.
“When rival businesses share competitively sensitive information – including through a third-party data analytics provider – this reduces the uncertainty competing businesses normally have about how each other will act," the CMA said in a statement.
“This can affect how strongly companies compete because it makes it easier for them to predict what each other will do and coordinate their behaviour. At this stage, no assumptions should be made about whether the law has been broken."
The CMA will spend the next six months gathering information as part of its probe.
Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com