The online hotel booking service Booking.com (the management company is the Dutch Booking.com BV) has canceled the price parity at the request of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) of Russia, the press service of the department reported.
Booking.com continues to challenge the sanctions, company representatives told Izvestia. “We were disappointed with the court’s decision, but as a responsible company, we consider it our priority to comply with all applicable laws and regulations in Russia, as we try to do in all countries in which we operate,” Booking said.
At the end of August, the Moscow Arbitration Court satisfied the claim of the FAS, which concluded that Booking.com was imposing unfavorable terms of contracts on Russian hotels and hotels. The latter were prohibited from selling rooms at a price lower than that published on the aggregator’s website. The FAS ordered to exclude this provision from the contracts, but the service did not fulfill the requirement and in August was fined 1.3 billion rubles. The decision of the Arbitration Court on November 11 was confirmed by the appellate instance, after which it came into legal force.
The case was opened in 2019 after an appeal to the FAS of the public organization “Support of Russia”. The hoteliers argued that the price parity had led to higher commissions for hotels and an increase in the cost of services to end users, since it included a fee that the hotel was obliged to pay to the aggregator. Booking.com, whose share of the Russian market exceeds 80%, stated the opposite: supposedly, such a practice is necessary so that hotels cannot indicate inflated prices on the platform, motivating tourists to book rooms directly.
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