An article on the website of the trade journal Hotels sounds an alarm to hoteliers, and by extension, to consumers: Expedia and its sister site Hotels.com are blocking hotels under the Choice Hotels umbrella from searches on their sites.

The alleged reason? Here’s a quote from the piece, for the wonkish:

For some time now, we have been hearing from many industry sources that during renewal negotiations Expedia/Hotels.com has demanded new terms and conditions that are against everything the hospitality industry stands for: last room availability, guarantees that the best rates are only found on Expedia/Hotels.com sites, penalties to properties that do not use their sites 100% of the time, etc. These contract renewal “negotiations” have been described to us by some participants from various hotel companies as “here are our terms – take it or leave it”-type of meetings and “practically lack of any essence of a real negotiation,” etc.

In other words, these new terms and conditions demanded by Expedia will effectively take away hoteliers’ rights to manage inventory and rates at their own hotels, destroy channel management and rate parity, and will eventually lead to a long-term erosion of hotel brand and price integrity in the same manner it did after 9/11 in 2001.

Since Choice is apparently not playing along, they’re missing from search results on Expedia-owned sites. That means that customers looking for a hotel will have to look somewhere other than Expedia if they want a more complete picture of the lodging landscape. That’s nearly 5000 properties that are off of Expedia’s grid. And there may be others.

Granted, the Choice properties (Quality, Comfort, Econolodge, Clarion) aren’t ones that I long to be staying at. You may not miss them. But for the budget-minded or the roadside sleep-seeker, these brands are generally reliable, standard motel fare. And now, on Expedia, it’s as if the hotels didn’t exist.

Part of me doesn’t have a problem with this. The big online travel agencies aren’t search engines. They’re businesses, and they’re trying to make as much money as they can. They don’t claim to represent every hotel in the world, and it’s their prerogative to keep out a company that isn’t willing to ante up.

But for consumers, it makes apples-to-apples comparisons harder, and thus makes loyalty to a single agency hard to justify. It also makes metasearch more important. Using a search like Kayak, which once claimed to want to catalog every hotel on the planet, looks more attractive for first-cut hotel searches.

Expedia is risking losing customers’ trust. If the agency wants to hardball its suppliers, that’s its option. But consumers would be right to ask if Expedia is in their corner.