The background is a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which declared twenty years of price clauses illegal.
Booking.com risks having to pay billions of euros in damages in a class action lawsuit involving over 10,000 European hotels. The lawsuit, announced on Thursday, August 7, 2025, and coordinated by the European Hoteliers’ Association (Hotrec), the Hotel Claims Alliance , and around thirty other associations, is based on a ruling by the European Court of Justice on September 19, 2024, declaring price parity agreements illegal. Hotels were not allowed to offer lower prices outside of Booking.com due to these agreements. Thanks to these agreements, the platform has been able to dominate the market for over twenty years. The European ruling did not automatically order damages—it simply found that those clauses violated competition laws—but it did provide the hotels with the legal basis to now seek damages incurred from 2004 to 2024. The case will be adjudicated by a court in the Netherlands, where Booking.com is based, and where the hotel operators must demonstrate the specific financial damages incurred by those business practices.
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Equality provisions and the European process’s path
Price parity clauses were contractual provisions that every hotel had to accept to be listed on Booking.com. Essentially, the hotelier could not sell its rooms at a lower price on any other channel, including its own website . If a room cost €100 on Booking.com, it had to cost at least €100 everywhere else. This system prevented hotels from offering discounts for bookings directly on their own website , even though they did not have to pay the 10-25% commission retained by Booking.com . As a result, hotels were forced to maintain higher prices everywhere, and consumers always paid the full rate, inflated by the platform’s commissions.
Booking.com Booking.com “broad parity clauses ,” which prohibited lower prices on both hotel websites and competing platforms like Expedia. Antitrust authorities in Germany, France, and Italy launched investigations in 2013–2014, forcing the platform to switch to “narrow parity clauses” on July 1, 2015. This modified version allowed different prices on other platforms but maintained the ban on direct hotel websites. German hoteliers , particularly the 25hours hotel company Berlin
The Amsterdam court faced a complex question: could the parity clauses be considered “ancillary restrictions” necessary to the platform’s operation, and therefore legitimate, or were they genuine anti-competitive restrictions? The Dutch judges decided to seek interpretation from the Court of Justice of the European Union, recognizing that the issue had implications for the entire European digital market. due to free-riding : customers would only use the platform to search for hotels and then always book elsewhere to save money.Booking.com
The ruling of the EU Court and the class action
The Court of Justice’s ruling of September 19, 2024, was categorical: price parity clauses, whether broad or narrow, are neither necessary nor proportionate offering better prices on their direct channels . It is important to note that the ruling did not order compensation or impose penalties: it simply found that the clauses violated Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which prohibits anti-competitive agreements. This ruling has provided hotels with the legal recourse they have been waiting for years . With a definitive ruling from Europe’s highest court on the unlawfulness of the clauses, hoteliers now have a solid basis for seeking damages.Booking.com
Meanwhile, the European Digital Markets Act “gatekeeper ,” permanently banning its use of parity clauses. The platform was therefore forced to abandon these practices, but for hotels, the damage of twenty years had already been done. Alexandros Vassilikos, Hotrec’s president, expressed that following years of inequitable circumstances, the moment has arrived to pursue justice. The class action lawsuit will allow hotels to join forces to demonstrate the damages they have suffered: loss of direct bookings, inability to retain customers, and profit margins eroded by commissions that could not be recovered through competitive pricing policies.Booking.com
The deadline for the hotel class action lawsuit has been moved to August 29, 2025. Consumentenbond and Stichting consumeren competition claims have launched their own lawsuit, claiming that travelers have paid hundreds of millions of euros more due to artificially inflated prices . In one week, 180,000 consumers 71% of the European market , could find itself having to pay one of the highest compensation payments in the history of digital commerce.Booking.com Booking.com
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