Dawn Gilbertson (2:57)

And this is not a small market. This is a really big booming business monitoring livestock. How big of a market are we talking?

Bel Lin (3:03)

Yeah, it's not quite a $2 billion market, but it's growing at a nearly compound annual growth rate of 7 point something percent. And so it's a growing market, but it's limited by things like farmer adoption. Farmers do need to be aware that technologies exist and have to be able to make the justification that the technology is worth it.

Dawn Gilbertson (3:24)

The big question I think is will this eventually replace a need for humans to do whatever this technology is doing? And you did talk to a farmer who said that that has actually been the case on his farm. Trackers have replaced a few humans.

Bel Lin (3:36)

That's right. Yeah, it is. One of the big headline goals of these smart devices is that when you don't need as many eyes and ears on every single animal in your herd, then you can save a lot in terms of the manual labor required. But humans can't be replaced altogether by these wearables because there's something called cow sense. Cowsense is basically this intuition that farmers have to say, something's going on with my cow, I need to get a veterinarian in here to take a look. And so that at this point can't be replaced. But it's certainly scaling back the number of manual hours and labor that this particular farmer requires.

Dawn Gilbertson (4:10)

And another farmer also talked to you about issues with connectivity with some of the devices, like what happens if they fall offline or a portion of that tracker population isn't working. How do the farmers adjust to that or how do they work through it?

Bel Lin (4:23)

It's a barrier to adoption as well, where if you don't have Internet connectivity in this very rural part of your farm, then you can't get the data synced back up to the cloud in either direction. So essentially the callers are worthless and the data is worthless. And so that's one of the challenges that dairy farmers across the country have faced because they are in actually more spread out locations than their fellow crop farmers who are also using precision technologies, but do tend to be in a little less far flung areas. And so they really have to wait until the Internet's back online in order for, for the data to connect both in and off of the cloud.

Julie Chang (4:58)

That was WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with reporter Bell, Lynn Coming up, Thinking of booking a hotel for an upcoming trip? Beware of copycat hotel websites posing as real hotel sites. We'll tell you how these dupes have been ripping off consumers after the.

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Julie Chang (5:44)

Summer is just a few months away and folks may have already started booking hotels for their travels. If you're searching online, you've likely come across sponsored ads that make you think you're booking directly with a hotel. Well, check those links twice because there's a chance you're not. WSJ travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson spoke with Victoria Craig about the rise of copycat hotel sites and their enormous fees.

Dawn Gilbertson (6:12)

So Don, I like to think that I'm a fairly savvy hotel booker myself, but even I've been duped by this kind of thing. How do you identify the travel agency sites and the actual hotel booking sites?

Victoria Craig (6:24)

Click on it. There's not going to be any problem if you just click on it initially and if things don't look right. But the thing that you should really look at first is the total price. And then shop around and see if there's a big variance between prices. And if you see a big variance, that's a big red flag.

Dawn Gilbertson (6:40)

Describe what the most meaningful difference is. Why should you prefer to book on a hotel's site versus another third party site?

Victoria Craig (6:46)

I'm a big direct booker myself. I recommend it to travelers all the time because you really generally do not want a middleman when things go wrong in travel. We've all been on an airline, we've all booked a hotel and then we're like, oh, I need to change something or something changes and they're going to tell you you have to go back to where you booked it. So the issue there is if you book directly with the hotel or the airline, you have only one place to call and they have a little more control over what they can do for you.

Dawn Gilbertson (7:15)

A lot of these sites will sort of force you into a non refundable rate. So once you realize that you didn't book where you wanted to book, it's too late. You can't do anything.

Victoria Craig (7:24)

Well, yes, if you get your confirmation, you're happy with this price. You didn't maybe didn't read the fine print, you're happy with this price and then all of a sudden you're like, whoa, I booked a prepaid Room that's not changeable, not refundable. Now I must know, and a couple readers pointed this out to me, you can also run into some of these issues with the expedias and booking and price lines because you can save money. There's nothing wrong with prepaying for a hotel room unless you think there's a giant chance that you're going to change your plans because those are the lowest rates these days are the prepaid. But where these lookalike hotel websites, where you get into trouble is they charge extra fees. That's what you're not going to find on an Expedia or a Priceline or a booking.

Dawn Gilbertson (8:02)

And this has become so ubiquitous, I suppose it has become very difficult for consumers to really spot the difference. If you put in say the hotel chain that you want to book in Google, this is likely to be one of the first ones that come up. It's become such a problem that the Federal Trade Commission and the hotels have teamed up looking into this as a problem.

Victoria Craig (8:20)

They've been looking at this for years. The FTC cracked down on them in 2017, but yet they still are around Google a hotel. And chances are the first thing in your search list is going to be a hotel. That is not the direct booking site. Plenty of times it is Hilton. The big chains have money to pay up and then get first when the sponsored ads. But then there's these other players and people really, really, really need to be aware of this because the price difference can be huge. And once you book, if it's not refundable, you're out.

Dawn Gilbertson (8:51)

And that was what I was going to ask is how has this become such a pervasive problem? Is it that these third party companies just have the money to pay to have their websites go up higher in the search rankings? What does it come down to?

Victoria Craig (9:04)

I think that's reason number one. This one site that I kept coming upon over and over again, guestreservations.com and not every single hotel, but when you search a lot of hotels, it's the first one that comes there. And the way they trick you is they, they put like a keyword like guest or reservation in the URL. So you're looking at and you're thinking here's the name of my hotel. So they use the name of the hotel and then they use something like guest and then you're like oh, okay, well what's wrong with this? And sometimes there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Right. If the price difference is teeny tiny and you get there and your room is fine. But some of the examples that I found, the price difference was so egregious, there was absolutely no reason to book on the lookalike website.

Dawn Gilbertson (9:43)

If the FTC is already looking into this but hasn't been able to do anything, how do you stop it?

Victoria Craig (9:48)

That's a million dollar question, right? I mean, the hotel association says it's all about education. That's why I wrote the story. These ads are going to be out there until there's a further crackdown. But really the most important really thing I think for consumers to know, travelers to know is just take your time when booking. Unless this is something you've got a jet out of town for a funeral something, all bets are off, right? But really take some time. And you know, you can also call the hotel. I know it sounds so old fashioned in 2025. Call the hotel, ask what is. I'd seriously highly recommend that if you're gonna plunk down money for a week stay, even a weekend stay, before you click buy on an online site, take five minutes and say, is this your website? Because let me tell you, the hoteliers aren't happy with these sites whatsoever. First of all, they don't get any of that extra money. They don't get the money they're charging us all they get at the front desk. If people do realize this is some angry guests.

Julie Chang (10:41)

That was WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with our travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with our supervising producer Emily Martosi. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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