On 9 September 2026, the General Court dismissed Booking’s appeal and upheld the Commission’s prohibition of its proposed acquisition of Etraveli, a leading online travel agency for flights (Case T-1139/23).

The transaction was prohibited despite only a limited overlap between the parties’ activities in online travel agency services for flights. The Commission relied mainly on the following relatively novel theories of harm:

• Reverse leveraging: Previous practice and the Commission’s current merger guidelines address the use of a dominant position to strengthen a non-dominant position in another market. Here, by contrast, the Commission considered that Booking could use its non-dominant position in online flight booking to entrench its existing dominant position in online hotel booking.

• Expansion of an online travel agency ecosystem: The transaction would have enabled Booking to create a travel services ecosystem that was “stickier” for new and existing customers and difficult for competitors to replicate.

On appeal, the General Court upheld the prohibition, finding that the errors it identified in the Commission’s economic analysis did not undermine the decision’s overall validity.

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