Ban likely for OTA rate parity deals
Priceline Group Inc’s Booking.com has run foul of German antitrust regulators and the OTA is likely to face a ban its best-price deals with hotels.
Booking.com and Expedia Inc are still using rate parity clauses in contracts with accommodation providers despite a 2013 order by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office ruling not to stop hotels from giving better prices to competitors or directly to customers, according to Bloomberg.
“The Bundeskartellamt [Federal Cartel Office] intends to forbid Booking.com, by far the largest hotel portal in Germany, from further use of the best-prices clauses,” regulators said in the statement. “The ongoing procedure against Expedia continues.”
The Bundeskartellamt said it rejected Booking.com’s proposal to settle the case as insufficient. The company also made offers to French, Swedish and Italian antitrust regulators last year to end their parallel probes.
British authorities must decide whether to re-open a probe into Booking.com, Expedia and InterContinental Hotels Group Plc after a court overturned a planned settlement.
Booking.com declined to immediately comment.
Hotel Reservation Service Robert Ragge GmbH isn’t appealing a court challenge against the Bundeskartellamt order that it lost in January, the cartel office said. The order told HRS to delete best-price clauses from its contracts.
–With assistance from Cornelius Rahn in Berlin.
This article was written by Aoife White from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
