French authorities have found that Google LLC displayed misleading information about hotels to users and fined the company 1.1 million euros, or about $1.3 million, over the matter.

France’s General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control announced the decision today.

The penalty concludes an investigation that the watchdog launched in 2019 following complaints from the local hospitality industry. In France, hotels are ranked on a scale of one to five stars according to a set of criteria defined by Atout France, the country’s tourism development agency.

Google also displays hotels in search results with rankings measured on a five-star scale. The issue was that Google didn’t assign stars to hotels based on the official Atout France criteria but rather used its own classification system.

The rankings generated by the system appeared in Google’s flagship search engine and Google Maps. The practice, authorities found, misled consumers about what level of service they could expect from hotels. Google’s classification system also hurt some hotel operators by displaying their establishments in search results with a lower star count than their official Atout France ranking.

The 1.1 million euro fine was issued to the search giant’s Google France and Google Ireland subsidiaries. As part of an agreement with the public prosecutor of Paris, the company has updated its hotel ranking system to comply with Atout France requirements. 

“We have now settled with the DGCCRF [the General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, as it’s known by its French acronym] and made the necessary changes to only reflect the official French star rating for hotels on Google Maps and Search,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch today.

Earlier this year, in a higher-profile decision, Apple Inc. was fined 1.1 billion euros by French regulators for conspiring with local wholesalers to fix prices. The penalty was at the time described as the largest of its kind. The iPhone maker was found to have told two key distribution partners in France, Tech Data Corp. and Ingram Micro Ltd., to charge the same prices for its products that it charged through its own stores.

In the European Union, tech giants have also faced scrutiny over their privacy policies. Italy’s competition watchdog last September launched a probe into Apple, Google and Dropbox Inc. aimed at, among other things, uncovering whether the companies failed to adequately inform consumers that their personal data is collected and used for commercial purposes. 

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