Booking Holdings has lost its court challenge to the European Commission’s veto of its planned acquisition of Etraveli, the Swedish online flight seller. The EU’s General Court upheld the 2023 prohibition in a ruling issued on a Wednesday, Skift reported on 10 September, leaving the roughly €1.63bn ($1.9bn) deal dead unless a further appeal succeeds.
The Commission blocked the takeover in September 2023. It found that Booking held more than 60% of the hotel online travel agency market in the European Economic Area, with only one sizeable and much smaller rival.
Flights as a funnel
The case turned on how travellers move between products. Brussels argued that people who book a flight are prime targets for hotel offers, so owning Etraveli would bring Booking a stream of new customers and deepen the network effects that make it hard for rivals to compete. According to Skift, the court accepted the Commission’s view that flights serve as a low-margin customer-acquisition channel feeding Booking’s hotel business, reinforcing its dominant position.
Booking had offered to show a choice screen of rival hotel offers at flight checkout, powered by its own Kayak metasearch service. The Commission rejected that remedy, saying Kayak’s control over ranking made it neither transparent nor easy to police, and that it did not cover other cross-selling channels such as emails.
Consequences for strategy
Skift said the ruling pushes Booking to build its “Connected Trip” across flights, hotels and other services by organic growth rather than acquisitions in Europe. Booking keeps a distribution partnership with Etraveli. Expedia, which regulators do not regard as dominant in Europe, has completed deals for Tiqets and CarTrawler this year without EU objection. A HOTREC study in September found Booking.com alone took 66.1% of European hotels’ online-agency bookings in 2025.
The ruling turns Booking’s scale in Europe from a launch pad for deals into a legal ceiling on them.
What to watch
- Whether Booking takes the case to the EU Court of Justice.
- How Brussels treats future travel deals by Booking under merger rules and the Digital Markets Act.
- Whether Expedia keeps buying in Europe while Booking is constrained.
