Hotel bookings in Miami are only done through travel website

[JbhB682]

Source : GMAT prep

Hotel bookings in Miami are only done through travel websites. In 2011, there were 50,000 fewer hotel room night bookings then there were in 2010. Hotel owners are blaming the apartment renting service by new website Miami@50 that not only sells hotel room bookings at bargain prices but also allows people to rent out their houses. The website owners dispute the charge stating that they only rented out only 8,000 apartments through their website. They claim that the down economy and not their website is responsible for majority of the decline in hotel room bookings.

Which of the following if true most seriously weakens the Miami@50 owners claim?

A. Miami@50 rents apartments at a much lower price then it rents hotel rooms.
B. Miami@50 rented out at least 8 times as many hotel room nights bookings as apartments.
C. Most apartments in that Miami@50 rented out were rented out multiple times.
D. Miami@50’s profit from renting out apartments was higher than it was for renting out hotel rooms.
E. Most of Miami@50’s customers preferred renting an apartment to renting a hotel room

OA : C

[JbhB682]

Hi Experts - if there was an option F that said ( Just testing a scenario playing out in my head)

(option F) Miami@50 rented out at-least 64000 hotel room night bookings in 2011

Would this option F weaken the argument ?

[esledge]

There are some typos in the question, but assuming the language used in the official question is close to the text in your post, there are a couple disconnects in the argument:

(1) One apartment might not equal one hotel room, in terms of number of the number of people it can accommodate. (A larger group might need 4 hotel rooms, but only one apartment.)

(2) “rented out 8,000” apartments is not the same thing as a “room night booking.” (The hotel owners are counting 1 night * 1 room as a “booking,” but Miami@50 didn’t say how many nights each apartment was rented.)

Your suggested choice (F) seems to address (2) by using the words “hotel room night bookings,” but wouldn’t those hotel rooms still count as rentals for benefit of the hotel owners (Miami@50 website is just the middle man)? In other words, this choice would suggest that Miami@50 is helping the hotel owners…so we still don’t know why there was a decline in bookings in 2011. I think (F) doesn’t weaken (or strengthen) the claim that the “economy…is responsible for the majority of the decline in hotel bookings.”