Booking.com draft General Terms of Delivery - complaint from IHA (Germany)
IHA (Germany) was written a letter to Booking.com, addressing several amendments to their draft General Terms of Delivery which are incompatible with German and European law.
The letter points out that “the planned amendments are consistently detrimental to the hotels and are therefore an expression and consequence of the outstanding market power of Booking.com.”
Several elements in particular are identified as incompatible with the requirements of the Platform to Business Regulation (Regulation 2019/1150):
- general terms and conditions are not formulated "clearly and comprehensibly" (Article 3 (1)a);
- no specification regarding the weighting of the individual criteria of the ranking algorithm (Article 5).
- breach of the requirement to outline very precise, binding and strict requirements as to the circumstances and methods under which notices of termination or suspensions can be issued or imposed at all (Article 4).
In addition, the letter addresses several abusive practices and inaccuracies which may harm German hoteliers:
- the General Terms of Delivery are inaccurately translated from English to German;
- reintroduction of wide rate parity;
- Booking.com awards itself all-encompassing powers of inspection or search of the hotels
- Booking.com reserves itself the right to intercept and read the communication between the hotel and the guest, which represents a massive intrusion into the private and business sphere of both the hotel and the guest.
Please find below the original version of the letter sent by IHA to Booking.com in German as well as a machine-translated English version of the letter.
We would be very grateful to learn from you whether you have identified a similar unwelcome development to draft Booking.com General Terms and Delivery in your home market.
Original version of the letter (in German):
Machine-translated English version: