Lending tree and a ton of other companies in that space are just lead gen, they couldn't care less about you as long as you fill in their form and they can then resell the data to other companies. Who in turn, if they can't make a buck on you will sell it to someone else in order to try to recoup some of their expenses.
The fact that you fill in a form signals 'intent to buy' and that makes those leads worth a lot of money. The only way they can make that work is if they sell the lead as soon as possible after you've filled it out because of the competitive nature of the market. So that's exactly what they do: sell it to multiple parties at once. It's a terrible model and one of the reasons why as soon as some online calculator is broken up into multiple steps I already know where it's headed: the last form will ask for my email address to mail the offer to and my phone number for verification. I simply abandon the process at that point, and I hope their funnel analysis tells them that story a million times a day.
That’s not the only way, they can make that work, it’s the way they’ve chose. That’s why it’s a terrible model.
Trip planning sites may sell leads to companies, but they don’t have to for the system to work. They have taken a different route to getting you a deal on a product.
FWIW, I found dinkytown.net for basic online financial calculators with no frills or upsells a long time ago. They sell to websites that want to use financial calculators, so they don’t care about consumers.
That cynical take is false. Many businesses care about their customers, as if you care for them they will come back again and again, while if you don't they will leave.
Lead generation firms care about their customers - but their customers are not the users, it is the people buying the leads. This disconnect is why they don't care.
You get the same problem at ad supported companies (news, social media...). For a long time news papers had careful public policies in places to separate the editorial side from the ad side, so they could be independent. Many advertisers hated it because the editors they were paying did things against them - but they put up with it because those editors brought in the readers of the ads. That has broken down in the modern age though.
The fact that you fill in a form signals 'intent to buy' and that makes those leads worth a lot of money. The only way they can make that work is if they sell the lead as soon as possible after you've filled it out because of the competitive nature of the market. So that's exactly what they do: sell it to multiple parties at once. It's a terrible model and one of the reasons why as soon as some online calculator is broken up into multiple steps I already know where it's headed: the last form will ask for my email address to mail the offer to and my phone number for verification. I simply abandon the process at that point, and I hope their funnel analysis tells them that story a million times a day.