A WebmasterWorld thread has reports of searchers noticing a new ad format available for hotels. The ad came up for a search on [las vegas hotels], although I cannot replicate it myself, and you see the typical comparison ads.

Matt McGee posted a picture of the ad on Search Engine Land:

This seems to be powered by the comparison ad feature, along with Google's hotel finder tool, as we also saw in the maps results.

Alex posted at WebmasterWorld saying:

This is an extremely aggressive move by Google. They will eat up the clicks share for these valuable keywords, drive more traffic to Hotel Finder and ultimately command higher rates that OTA's will have to pay to play. If this strategy works, Kayak is in big trouble. I see the exact same thing happening for Flight searches.

How do you feel?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.