There are a ton of hotel search engines out there. However, the vast majority seem to be controlled by the same big players, offering the same inventory and often the same pricing too. For example, Booking Holdings operates Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, while Expedia also owns Travelocity, Hotwire, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets, Wotif and Trivago.
And it gets worse: metasearch engines were invented to search all the hotel booking sites, but most of these have also been acquired by the big boys, with eg. Kayak and HotelsCombined now being just frontends for Booking. Google Hotels is the one remaining independent one, but you can't actually book with it, it just redirects to other sites.
So: How many independent global hotel search engines are there? Or in practical terms, if I want to find and check pricing across all available hotels in a given location, how many places do I need to check?
(For the purpose of this question, let's exclude Airbnb-style holiday rentals, those rare hotels that aren't listed on any OTA, and country-specific search sites.)
