A WELL-known village pub near Salisbury has closed its doors for good, after its visibility on a leading travel website was changed.

The Swan at Stoford, Warminster Road, ceased trading earlier this month after seven years of service, as a result of declining accommodation and food sales.

According to the The Swan team however, Booking.com is to blame for the loss, as the travel search engine changed geographical information about the pub’s whereabouts on its website.

Instead of leaving the watering hole’s location as Salisbury, Booking.com edited the establishment’s details to be categorised under Stapleford, which in turn meant it came up less in searches.

A statement from The Swan’s Facebook page said that following the edit, there had been a 60 per cent decline in room sales and the business had become “unviable”.

It added: “Booking.com is the market leader and dictates market conditions as such, and early this year it decided that despite our legal address being Salisbury, [the website] would purposely edit our listing after six years trading together to omit us completely from Salisbury and classify us as Stapleford without consultation.”

In response a statement from Booking.com said: “Our overarching aim at Booking.com is to provide our customers with transparent information that empowers them to find the stays and travel experiences that are just right for them, and this includes how we assign properties to a specific destination.

“Although we have not made any recent changes to our geolocation policies, if we are made aware of an inconsistency, we take steps to address it as part of our continuing efforts to set accurate expectations for our customers.”

The statement from The Swan team on Facebook added: “This is an example of market manipulation by a market leader using tech policies to get the desired result to benefit selected partners, the consequence of this has resulted in 10 redundancies, closure of a family business and home and the loss of an iconic pub.”