Latest / STR Unpacked / A bailiff walked into Booking.com's Amsterdam HQ this week.
Transcript
- Ben: Good morning and welcome to your short term rental bulletin on May the 8th. So this week, Abaylift walked into Booking.com's Amsterdam headquarters with a team of IT specialists and started seizing its records. This is not a raid. This is not a protest. This is a court ordered evidence seizure on behalf of more than 15,000 hotels across Europe. So here's the backstory. For two decades, Booking.com has made hotels sign a price parity clause so you couldn't offer a cheaper rate on your own website and you couldn't undercut booking.com anywhere and in return hotels paid commissions of 15, 20 and sometimes even 30 percent. Then in 2024 the European Court of Justice ruled these clauses illegal and booking dropped them and then 15,000 hotels backed by hot rec and the Hotel Claims Alliance said, fine. Now refund the years of inflated commissions. The problem? Hotels say booking quietly cut off access to their old invoices and they need to prove the claim. ⁓ So an court authorized an evidence seizure and a bailiff went in and physically took the records. This matters beyond hotels. Every short term rental operator on any major OTA is signed into contracts written by the platform on terms set by the platform with data the platform controls. This case is the moment that the asymmetry started to crack and it's happening just 12 days before the new EU data sharing regulation goes live. The platform era I think is being rewritten in real time. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week.