Google appears to have rebuilt the hotel results EU searchers see for generic queries, inserting two new modules between the search box and any hotel listing. The change surfaced the same morning the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act fine against Google became public, letting searchers see and screenshot the result within hours. That speed is what makes this the most trackable story to come out of the ruling so far.
Hotel SEO specialist Lluc B. Penycate documented the rollout on X, not Google. “I think Google has begun rolling out a major change to Hotel Search in the EU,” he wrote. He added: “Following the European Commission’s findings that Google’s hotel search experience did not fully comply with the DMA, we were expecting changes to the Hotel Local Pack.”
On searches like “Hotels in Playa de Palma,” Penycate found a Hotel Multi-Pack now sits where the old Hotel Local Pack used to route users straight into Google Hotels. Multiple travel providers appear first, and each one expands into its own set of hotel listings. Users pick a company before they pick a room.
That ordering matters more than it looks. Penycate called it a module that “creates an entirely new discovery layer.” The mechanism is simple: once a searcher commits to a provider before seeing any hotel, that provider effectively becomes its own hotel search engine running inside Google’s results. Visibility on a generic hotel query no longer means ranking near the top. It means being one of the providers a searcher opens first.
A second module, Hotel Websites (rendered in Spanish results as “Sitios web de hoteles”), follows the Multi-Pack. Penycate described it this way: “This highlights official hotel websites with direct links, prices and hotel cards, creating a dedicated surface for direct suppliers.” It is the one part of the redesign that puts an independent hotel site, not a platform, directly in front of the searcher.
Penycate’s own read of the stakes is direct: “if this rollout expands across Europe, it could reshape how hotels measure visibility and direct demand. The booking journey now includes multiple visibility layers before a user even reaches an official hotel website.”
None of this comes from a Google announcement. It is one specialist’s observation of live results, reported by Search Engine Roundtable, and Google has not confirmed scope, permanence, or an EU-wide timeline. Google has also made DMA-driven hotel changes before, in 2024, and the company has separately run internal tests it says show DMA-style hotel results perform worse for hotels. That history is a reason to verify before reacting, not a reason to ignore the screenshots.
Hotels and OTAs operating in the EU have a concrete task this week: capture a baseline of current rankings and click paths for core generic queries before this rollout, if it holds, expands or reverses. The Hotel Websites module deserves the most testing of the two. It is the only new surface where a direct booking link competes on equal footing with the platforms sitting in the Multi-Pack above it. Checking whether a hotel’s own site appears there, and with what price and card data, is the fastest way to learn whether this DMA fix helps direct bookings or simply hands OTAs a second pack to win.
Search Engine Roundtable reported the rollout on July 23, 2026, based on hotel SEO specialist Lluc B. Penycate’s observations posted on X.
