Booking must now comply with the Digital Markets Act
As of today, Booking Holdings Inc. (BHI), designated as gatekeeper on 13 May 2024, must ensure that its online intermediation service, Booking.com, complies with all relevant obligations of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Concretely, this means hotels, car rental companies, and other providers of travel services that depend on Booking.com to reach their customers can begin to enjoy new opportunities, for instance:
- So-called ‘parity’ clauses are prohibited by the DMA. Therefore, hotels, car rentals and other service providers using Booking.com are now free to offer different (including better) prices and conditions on their own website or other channels than on Booking.com.
- Booking must not introduce other measures with the same effect as ‘parity’ clauses. For example, Booking is not allowed to increase commission rates or de-list offers of business users if they provide different prices on another website than on Booking.com. This means that other platforms and travel service providers can compete under fairer conditions, leading to innovation and lower prices.
- Hotels and other travel services will have real-time and continuous access to data that they and their customers generate through the use of Booking.com, offering these businesses new insights.
- Business users can now choose to transfer the data they generated on Booking.com to alternative platforms. This will allow hotels and other relevant travel service providers to develop more innovative deals and tailored offers, positioning them more competitively on the market.
As of today, Booking is required to demonstrate its full and effective compliance with the DMA by outlining the measures undertaken in a compliance report. The public version of this report is accessible on the Commission’s dedicated DMA webpage. Additionally, Booking has submitted to the Commission an independently audited description of techniques it uses for profiling consumers, along with a non-confidential version of the consumer profiling reports. Finally, the Commission ordered Booking to keep any documents and information which might be relevant to assess and monitor effective implementation of and compliance with the DMA.
The Commission will now carefully analyse the compliance report and assess whether the implemented measures are effective in achieving the objectives of the relevant obligations under the DMA. The Commission’s assessment will also be based on the input of interested stakeholders, including in the context of a public compliance workshop on 25 November 2024, where Booking is invited to present its solutions.
Background
The DMA aims to ensure contestable and fair markets in the digital sector. It regulates gatekeepers, which are large digital platforms that act as an important gateway between business users and consumers, whose position can grant them the power to create a bottleneck in the digital economy.
On 13 May 2024, the Commission designated Booking as a gatekeeper for its online intermediation service Booking.com. Following designation, Booking had six months to comply with all relevant obligations under the DMA, offering more choice and freedom to Booking.com consumers and business users.
If the Commission considers that Booking’s solutions are not compliant with the DMA, it can take formal enforcement actions using the entire toolbox at its disposal. In case of an infringement, the Commission can impose fines of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide turnover, which can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement. Moreover, in case of systematic non-compliance, the Commission is also empowered to adopt additional remedies such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it or banning the gatekeeper from certain acquisitions.
