Booking.com is facing a class-action lawsuit from more than 10,000 European hotels arguing that the accommodation mega-site used its muscle to distort the market to their detriment over a 20-year period.
The Association of Hotels, Restaurants and Cafes in Europe (Hotrec), which represents the industry within the EU and is bringing the legal action, recently extended to 29 August a deadline for hotel owners to join the suit because of high demand.
The lawsuit, expected to be one of the largest ever filed in the European hospitality sector, is also backed by 30 national hotel associations, including Britain’s.
“Over 10,000 hotels have already joined the pan-European initiative to claim compensation for financial losses caused by Booking.com’s use of illegal ‘best price’ (parity) clauses,” Hotrec said in a statement.
It alleges that the “best price” pledge on Booking.com was extracted from hotels under huge pressure not to offer rooms at lower prices on other platforms, including their own websites.
The hotel industry says that the Netherlands-based platform also used the clauses to prevent customers making what it called “free-rider” bookings, which it defined as using its services to find a hotel but then booking directly with the management, cutting out Booking.com.
“Registration [to the legal action] continues to grow steadily, and the response so far demonstrates the hospitality industry’s strong desire to stand up against unfair practices in the digital marketplace,” Hotrec said.
The litigation, which experts say will be an uphill battle, seeks damages for the period from 2004 to 2024, when Booking.com did away with the best price clause to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act.
Hotrec said the class action, to be heard in Amsterdam, follows a European court of justice (ECJ) ruling from 2024, “which found that Booking.com’s parity clauses violated EU competition law”.
“European hoteliers have long suffered from unfair conditions and excessive costs. Now is the time to stand together and demand redress,” said Hotrec’s president, Alexandros Vassilikos, calling out “abusive practices in the digital market” in Europe.
Booking.com called Hotrec and other hotel associations’ statements “incorrect and misleading” in an emailed statement, adding that it had not received “formal notification of a class action”.
It said that the ECJ ruling did not find that Booking.com’s “best price” clauses were anti-competitive but “simply stated that such clauses fall within the scope of EU competition law and that their effects must be assessed on a case-by-case basis”.
The company referred to a statement about its “commitment to fair competition”, in which it argued that “past parity clauses served to foster competitive pricing rather than restrict it”.
It cited a poll in which 74% of hoteliers said Booking.com made their business more profitable, with many reporting higher occupancy rates and lower customer acquisition costs. However, other industry representatives criticised the company’s practices as extractive.
“As they gained control of the market, Booking was able to increase its commission rates and exert much greater pressure on hoteliers’ margins,” Véronique Siegel, president of the hotels division of French hospitality sector association Umih, told public broadcaster France Inter.
“For a room that the customer pays €100 (£87) for, if you take away Booking’s commission, the hotelier receives €75 at best, with which they have to pay their employees and invest.”
Despite the friction, Booking.com appears unavoidable for many hotels, offering an online reach and visibility hard to achieve for smaller, independent establishments.
A study by Hotrec and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland found that Booking Holding, the website’s parent company, controlled 71% of the European market in 2024, compared with 68.4% in 2019.
The corporation is valued at $170bn (£127bn), three times that of Volkswagen.
Rupprecht Podszun, director of the institute for competition law at Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University, said Booking.com was a classic example of how a digital platform could conquer an entire sector, creating a “winner takes all” dynamic.
He said the legal action would probably be protracted and turn on the thorny question of how damages could be measured.
“Judges will have to form an opinion and then it will go through all the appeals – everything at great expense and with all the tricks available under the law,” he told Germany’s daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
“The case is a revolt of the hotels, saying: ‘You can’t just do what you want with us.’”