EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy: new publications

The EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy monitors and analyses the online platform economy. It supports the Commission in policy-making for online platforms.

We would like to draw your attention towards a set of publications recently published by the observatory:

• Analytical paper: “Multi-homing: obstacles, opportunities, facilitating factors”: We draw particular attention to this paper. It extensively covers how and why, despite the fact that hotels can 'multi-home' on several OTA platforms, the benefits of such multihoming are limited for hotels, exposing the many ways in which OTAs exert their market power over hoteliers. With regard to the Digital Markets Act, the facts provided under pages 27-28 offer very useful arguments to highlight why Booking.com acts as a gatekeeper.
• Monitoring of the implementation of the Platform to Business Regulation: this report provides useful data on the implementation of the P2B regulation, including by major OTA companies.
• Analytical paper “Structure of the online platform economy post COVID-19 outbreak”: "In the tourism sector, which has been severely hit by the lockdown measures and travel restrictions, data show a decrease in the use of OTAs and an increase in direct bookings via phone or hotel websites.11This trend reflects the need of travellers to establish direct contact with hotels to potentially ask questions in the context of the pandemic. In addition, while OTAs tend to target international trips, over the summer 2020 most people travelled domestically, where direct bookings are more common."