Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ANTITRUST NEWS: CMA launches monitoring project in online hotel booking sector, (Jul 13, 2016)
By Michael Menzhuber, J.D., LL.M.
As part of a joint monitoring project in the online hotel booking sector, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has sent a questionnaire to a large sample of hotels in the United Kingdom on how changes to room pricing terms are affecting the market, the agency announced today.
The project, which is looking at how the market has been affected by changes to room pricing terms and other recent developments, is in partnership with the European Commission and nine other national competition agencies in the European Union including Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
In July 2015, online travel agents Expedia and Booking.com changed their terms and conditions to remove certain "rate parity" or "most favored nation" requirements, which prevented hotels from offering cheaper room rates on competing online travel agents’ sites. The questionnaires will collect information to assess how the market has been affected by this change, along with other recent developments, which include several investigations across Europe into a range of pricing practices in the online booking sector.
The joint monitoring work, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2016, will enable the CMA (which closed its investigation into discounting restrictions in the hotel online booking sector in September 2015 and, at the same time, committed to 12 months of ongoing monitoring of market developments) and other competition agencies to determine whether or not there is a need for further action in the this sector.
Hotels in the U.K. that have be not been contacted directly by the CMA but are interested in participating can go to the CMA’s project page where a link to the questionnaire is available. The deadline for responses to the questionnaire is August 8.
News: Antitrust