Factsheet - How the DMA ensures businesses using Booking.com are free to set their prices on and off Booking.com

The Commission’s regulatory dialogues with gatekeepers in the framework of its enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) are delivering more fairness and transparency. Businesses which are active on Booking.com in the European Economic Area (EEA) can now freely set their prices and conditions on and off Booking.com, including on their direct sales channel.

What are parity clauses?

Parity clauses are contractual rules that require a business, like a hotel, not to offer more favourable terms, like better prices for the same service, on sales channels other than on the platform imposing these clauses. Such clauses can weaken the contestability of the platform imposing them, and lead to higher distribution costs for businesses such as hotels. The DMA bans parity requirements of any kind (contractual or other measures having the same effect) for designated platforms such as Booking.com.

How does the DMA’s parity ban benefit accommodation partners and consumers?

First, when accommodation partners are free to set more attractive prices on their own website, they are more likely to generate direct bookings on their own website. By doing so they do not need to pay a commission to a travel platform, which reduces their costs and increases their profits. As a result, accommodation providers have an incentive to lower prices for consumers and invest in their business to improve their services. 

Second, when accommodation partners are free to set lower prices on other travel platforms than Booking.com, this will over time increase competition between travel platforms. Competition leads to better quality of service and brings down prices for consumers. 

Updates on Booking.com’s compliance with the DMA’s ban on parity

Following a substantive regulatory dialogue with the Commission, Booking.com has been working on implementing additional measures to further support compliance with the DMA’s parity ban. This builds on the earlier removal of parity clauses from Booking.com’s General Delivery Terms (GDTs) and other terms applicable to accommodation providers.

Full removal of contractual parity requirements in July 2024

Before the DMA applied, Booking.com’s business terms included parity requirements in many countries in the EEA. Booking.com has removed these requirements from its General Delivery Terms (GDTs), agreements and partner programmes. Since then, its EEA-specific GDTs no longer contain any references to parity. At that time, Booking.com also removed contractual parity requirements as an eligibility criterion from its Genius, Preferred, and Preferred Plus programmes in the EEA. 

Prior to the introduction of the additional measures described below, Booking.com already did not rely on external prices for its default ranking on Booking.com and did not take external prices into account to decide whether accommodation providers qualify for Booking.com’s visibility-enhancing partner programmes, including Preferred, Preferred Plus and Genius in the EEA. However, external prices were still taken into account for the Booking Sponsored Benefit (BSB) eligibility.

Booking.com has now implemented additional measures following the continued regulatory dialogue with the Commission, and feedback from the travel sector. 

What’s new in September 2026

More transparency on Booking.com’s programmes and ranking, external price signals are no longer a factor for Booking.com’s BSB eligibility. These changes apply to all properties in the EEA.

Booking.com no longer looks at prices outside of Booking.com when deciding whether a property is potentially eligible for Booking Sponsored Benefit (BSB). Under BSB, Booking.com lowers the price shown to the customer and pays the difference itself, while the hotel receives the full amount corresponding to the rate it set and its agreed commission remains unchanged. 

Booking.com now provides additional information on how its partner programmes work and how prices offered on other sales channels are used. This includes updates to its Extranet, Partner Hub and a new FAQ section on Booking.com’s DMA compliance. In particular, Booking.com provides:    

• More information on BSB performance. Accommodation providers now have more performance and granular reservation-level data on how BSB affects bookings for their properties.
• Clearer information on Genius, Preferred and Preferred Plus programmes. More explanations on the functioning of the programme benefits, eligibility criteria, role and functioning of the “performance score”, including how accommodation providers are benchmarked geographically, and when participation in programmes may be suspended.
• Clearer role of external prices. Clear explanations that external price scans displayed on the Extranet are for information only and that external prices are neither used for the default ranking of listings on Booking.com, nor for the eligibility assessment of any of Booking.com’s above-mentioned programmes. The “competitive” and “non-competitive” labels have been removed from the Extranet, to avoid the perception that Booking.com expects price alignment across sales channels.
• Clearer information on ranking. Booking.com enhanced the information available on the Partner Hub about how the default ranking works, including by clarifying that external prices are not used as an input. This will also be reflected in an update to the GDTs (in particular, Annex 4, “Ranking”) later this year.

Accommodation providers are now better informed about their freedom to offer different prices and conditions on other sales channels. The conditions of Booking.com’s commercial programmes are more transparent and clarify that external prices are not used. 

Cooperation with national authorities

The Commission appreciates the good cooperation and coordination, through the European Competition Network, with competition authorities that have investigated or are currently investigating Booking.com’s practices, in particular the Greek, Italian, and Spanish national competition authorities.

The Commission notes that the voluntary changes made by Booking.com following regulatory dialogue with the Commission are without prejudice to ongoing proceedings against Booking.com carried out by the competition authorities of the Member States or indeed any other competent authorities of the Member States.

Background

The Commission designated Booking Holdings as a gatekeeper for its online intermediation service, Booking.com. This means that since 14 November 2024, Booking.com needs to comply with all relevant obligations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

One of these obligations is set out in Article 5(3) DMA. Based on this obligation, Booking.com cannot prevent accommodation providers from offering the same services through other channels at different prices or conditions. Booking.com must allow hotels, car rentals, and other relevant service providers to offer different prices, availability, inventory or commercial conditions on other online channels, including their own websites, than those offered on Booking.com, without facing measures that would restrict this freedom. 

The public version of Booking.com’s latest compliance report is available on the Commission’s DMA webpage.