Since 14 November 2024, Booking.com has been obliged to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). However, the German Hotel Association (IHA) believes that the market-dominating booking portal has failed to implement the necessary changes for its hotel partners in time. The German Hotel Association (IHA) and HOTREC, the umbrella association of hotels, restaurants, bars, cafés in Europe are of the opinion that the compliance report submitted by Booking.com only insufficiently or not at all considers several obligations set out in the DMA. „Booking.com is still not complying with the DMA requirements. The hotel industry in Germany and Europe is fed up with Booking.com's endless playing for time in implementing its legal obligations and is calling for prompt and decisive sanctions from the European Commission,” declares Markus Luthe, Chief Executive Officer of the German Hotel Association (IHA).
After carefully analysing Booking.com's current General Delivery Terms (GDTs) and the DMA regulations, the German Hotel Association (IHA) continues to see significant violations that massively impair the competitiveness of the hotel industry. Even Booking.com's statements at the workshop organised today in Brussels by the EU Commission on Booking.com's compliance with the DMA regulations were unable to dispel the hotel industry's concerns in any way, on the contrary. ‘Booking.com is currently still a long way from fulfilling the requirements of the DMA,’ says Tobias Warnecke, Managing Director of the German Hotel Association (IHA), assessing the current situation.
The hotel association believes that Booking.com has violated important DMA regulations in particular with the following practices:
Article 5(3) DMA is designed to prevent parity clauses by gatekeepers and to give hotels the freedom to offer more favourable rates on other platforms or channels. Despite this prohibition, Booking.com continues to exert indirect pressure on hotels by discounting room rates (‘undercutting’) out of its own margin, thereby distorting competition on other channels and de facto achieving the same negative results as with parity clauses.
Hotels that offer lower prices on other channels are disadvantaged by lower rankings in Booking.com's search results list, which is a violation of Art. 6(5) DMA. This represents a subtle but effective circumvention of the ban on parity clauses.
Booking.com continues to restrict hotels from communicating directly with guests until the booking is fully processed. This impairs the ability of hoteliers to build direct customer relationships and contradicts Art. 6(10) of the DMA, which provides for free interaction between hotels and travellers.
Other changes introduced by Booking.com are either of a cosmetic nature, such as access to data, or are not implemented at all. For example, hotels that want to use Booking.com's prepayment option do not have a choice of payment service provider. Equally striking and worrying is the fact that the company has failed to address ranking concerns. There is still a lack of transparency about how Booking.com's algorithms work.
