Each separate party is a business trying to optimize for their own bottom-line. You said it yourself, "optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet." The system as it exists is a relatively organic outgrowth of the competitive marketplace. Every intervention to make it more consumer-friendly (efficient by another measure) will be gamed & circumvented by the businesses.
I don't see a way to optimize it without replacing the system that measures success/survival by personal enrichment above-all.
Everything you said is true but it is also true for every other industry. Do you not think companies selling computer RAM for example not have the same motivations? How is that industry much less frustration to deal with than what we are discussing here?
In my opinion the free market should be able to solve this issue but I think therein lies the problem. There is no 1-to-1 mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering and that ambiguity is where the extra is skimmed off.
The free market has beaten the RAM industry. They cannot hide behind any ambiguity. RAM stick A has many direct comparisons to RAM stick B. Yes there are still some ambiguity like brand or quality reputation but overall it is very competitive. The market sucks for companies but is great for consumers. Hence we see bankruptcies once in a while when a major error is made (ie. When Windows 8 launched many companies overproduced in anticipation of new PC sales but when OS sales flopped they went bust)
If we can solve the issue with lack of clarity of what is being offered then we can build a mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering but this is why I say its easier to send people to Mars.
How are you going to get that info from each competitor? Lets say you managed to get it through regulation or some other mechanism. Then you have to normalize it across competitors. You can somehow try to break it down to literal things such as room size, does it have item A,B,C and then rate it at a very granular level. But then how to do you evaluate more subjective things like the area the hotel is in?
>Everything you said is true but it is also true for every other industry. Do you not think companies selling computer RAM for example not have the same motivations? How is that industry much less frustration to deal with than what we are discussing here?
The main difference between RAM sticks and the travel industry is that I don't get to travel around with the electrons in a RAM stick and experience the differences in signal quality and speed, but when traveling, we spend time inhabiting the products we are paying for, and we can feel the differences in quality and speed of our travel experiences.
The subtle differences between RAM sticks have real effects on the performance and longevity of a computer system, but are much harder for a human to perceive, so we don't typically don't focus on them.
>If we can solve the issue with lack of clarity of what is being offered then we can build a mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering but this is why I say its easier to send people to Mars.
The bigger idea I was trying to get across is that a competitive market system is not going going to be conducive to solving the problems that arise inside a competitive market system. You already intuitively know this, as you elaborate on, but since this system is as ubiquitous as the very air that we are breathing, it is not so obvious that it could be the root cause of the dysfunction we are talking about.
I don't see a way to optimize it without replacing the system that measures success/survival by personal enrichment above-all.