ICA publishes EU report on online hotel booking
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
ICA PUBLISHES EU REPORT ON ONLINE HOTEL BOOKING
The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM), the European Commission and nine other national competition authorities (the NCAs of Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and UK), published a report on the monitoring activity, conducted during 2016, in the online hotel booking sector. The purpose of the monitoring activity was to assess the effects - on the way in which hotels market their rooms– of the antitrust enforcement measures adopted in various Member States, which have led to changes into the contractual conditions applied to booking online. Namely, changes in the so-called 'wide parity clauses' used by online travel agents in their standard contracts with hotels. The participating authorities sent a uniform electronic questionnaire to a sample of 16,000 hotels in the ten participating Member States, plus questionnaires to 20 online travel agents, 11 metasearch websites and 19 large hotel chains. The results of the monitoring exercise suggest that both types of antitrust measures applied to online travel agent parity clauses - (a) a significant reduction of the scope of the MFN clauses, allowing large online travel agents to require parity only on offers made by the hotels through their own direct online sales channels; (b) prohibition of parity clauses altogether - have generally improved conditions for competition and led to more choice for consumers. However, the report also shows a fairly low level of awareness among hoteliers of the opportunities recent changes to online travel agent parity clauses could bring. Based on the results, the national competition authorities in the European Competition Network have agreed to keep the online hotel booking sector under review and to re-assess the competitive situation in due course. This will allow the sector more time to make full use of the measures that have already been taken. The monitoring exercise was commissioned by the European Competition Network (comprising the national competition authorities of all EU Member States and the European Commission) and announced by Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in December 2015. New enforcement actions or market investigations in the online hotel booking sector will be closely coordinated within the European Competition Network.
The report is available at http://ec.europa.eu/competition/ecn/hotel_monitoring_report_en.pdf.
Antitrust decisions related to Booking.com and Expedia are available at: