Here are a few of the stories that caught our attention over the week, with some of our takeaways.
Story 1
Booking Holdings Loses Its EU Court Appeal – And the Etraveli Deal Stays Dead
On 9 September, the General Court of the European Union dismissed Booking Holdings’ appeal in its entirety, upholding the European Commission’s 2024 decision to block Booking’s €1.63 billion acquisition of Swedish flight-booking platform Etraveli. The court endorsed the Commission’s “reverse leveraging” theory: that folding flight search into the world’s dominant hotel-booking platform would have entrenched Booking’s position in hotels themselves, not just added a flights product. Booking Holdings’ stock fell 3.81% to close at $173.43 on the news, and the company can still take this to the Court of Justice of the EU – so this isn’t quite the final word.
Don’t you think there’s something almost quaint about a merger review built entirely around protecting hotel distribution from further OTA consolidation, at the exact moment the whole booking funnel is being rebuilt around AI agents that don’t much care whose logo sits on the search box? I’ve spent enough of my career on the commercial side of this – watching international hotel groups negotiate distribution terms with the very platform this ruling concerns – to know regulators are usually fighting the last war. Etraveli would have made Booking a one-stop flights-plus-hotel shop. Fine. But Google, OpenAI and Amazon are already building the shop that doesn’t need Booking’s brand at all.
Let’s look at what this actually means for your commercial strategy. Nothing changes tomorrow. Booking still commands close to a fifth in average commission and still drives the majority of most independents’ OTA-sourced bookings. But the ruling is a reminder that the EU’s competition toolkit is built for yesterday’s distribution architecture – bundling, self-preferencing, platform power – while the more urgent question for hoteliers is who is quietly disintermediating everyone, Booking included, through conversational search. Watch the CJEU appeal if you like. Watch the AI booking layer more closely still.
Story 2
Marriott and Spotnana Just Made the GDS a Little Less Necessary
Marriott International and corporate travel technology firm Spotnana announced a direct integration on 10 September, connecting Spotnana straight into Marriott’s central reservation system through what the companies call a “proprietary patent-pending technology platform.” Corporate travel buyers using Spotnana-powered booking tools now get real-time pricing, inventory and full property content across more than 10,000 Marriott properties, plus the ability for travellers to link their Bonvoy loyalty accounts directly inside those platforms and to modify or cancel bookings without agent involvement. Marriott’s chief commercial performance officer, Shannon Patterson, called it reinforcement of “Marriott’s leadership in next generation corporate travel distribution.” It’s telling that this is the second such deal in as many months – Hilton did almost exactly this with Navan back in July.
Are you ready for what’s actually happening here? Two of the three largest hotel companies on earth are now building direct technical pipes into the platforms that manage corporate travel, rather than routing that content through the GDS layer that has sat between hotels and corporate bookers for the best part of forty years. Spotnana isn’t even a travel management company – it’s infrastructure, a content and connectivity layer that plugs into TMCs, booking tools and expense platforms. That distinction matters commercially. This isn’t Marriott selling more rooms through one more channel. It’s Marriott deciding which pipes carry its content at all, and building loyalty recognition and self-service servicing straight into that pipe rather than leaving a third party to represent it imperfectly.
So let’s look at what this means for the rest of the industry. If you’re a hotel group without the scale to build a “proprietary patent-pending” anything, this is the distribution arms race you’re watching from the sidelines – and it should sharpen how you think about your own channel manager and CRS relationships. The corporate travel channel used to be the boring, stable one. It just became the one where the biggest brands are spending real engineering budget to control the narrative.
Story 3
Google Just Pulled the Rug From Under “Book Direct” in Europe
Google has removed its vacation rentals unit from Search results across the European Economic Area, citing its ongoing efforts to comply with the Digital Markets Act. The feature previously let eligible direct properties appear on Google Travel without going through an OTA. Google’s SVP of knowledge and information, Nick Fox, said the change “degrades the user experience for Europeans – boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses.” HomeToGo’s chief executive, Patrick Andrae, took the opposite view on LinkedIn, calling it “a silver lining for fair competition.” The move follows a €460 million fine handed to Google this summer for self-preferencing in search – hotels, shopping, transport and sports were all named – with a compliance deadline running out later this month.
Here’s the myth worth busting. For years, the industry narrative has been that regulatory pressure on Big Tech is straightforwardly good news for independent operators trying to escape OTA commission. This is the counter-example. The vacation rentals unit was one of the few remaining tools letting a direct property show up in a Google search without paying an intermediary for the privilege. Fixing self-preferencing, in this case, means removing the tool – because what the DMA demands is a level playing field between Google’s own surfaces and third parties, not a guarantee that direct listings keep their spot.
Let’s look at what this actually means for commercial teams operating in the EEA. Don’t assume every regulatory intervention lands in your favour just because it’s aimed at a platform you resent. Google says it hopes to bring back a vacation rentals experience in the EEA “in the future.” Until it does, anyone leaning on that unit for direct visibility in Europe has lost a channel, not gained one – and the reminder here is that distribution strategy has to track the actual mechanics of these rulings, not just the headline of who’s being punished.
Story 4
The Law That Killed Booking.com’s Green Badge Reaches Your Hotel on 27 September
From 27 September, the EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive – Directive (EU) 2024/825 – applies across every EU country, with no grace period. It bans vague environmental claims such as “eco-friendly,” “green” and “sustainable” unless you can evidence the performance behind them, bans uncertified green badges and leaf symbols, and bans calling a stay “carbon neutral” on the strength of purchased offsets. This isn’t a new rulebook so much as a sharpening of the consumer-protection law your market already enforces. Booking.com read the direction of travel two and a half years early: it switched off its Travel Sustainable badge worldwide in March 2024, after the Dutch consumer authority found the programme likely misleading, and replaced it with a filter based on outside certification – precisely the standard the new directive now asks of everyone.
Here’s the myth-busting bit. Most hoteliers, asked where their sustainability claims live, will point to their own website. That’s the easy part, and probably the smallest part. The real exposure sits in places nobody thinks to check: the sustainability boxes ticked in your channel manager years ago, the green-practices section on your OTA listing that you never wrote and likely have never read, the sustainability filter a corporate travel booker screens properties against, your Google Business Profile. Every one of those is your hotel making a claim, regardless of who typed it.
Let’s look at what this actually means practically. You have three doors, and you pick one per claim: say something specific you can prove – the solar panels went in last spring; hold a real certification, such as the EU Ecolabel, which is what earns you the right to use the broader word; or say nothing about it, which is completely legal and the option nobody selling a compliance package will lead with. Fines run up to 4% of turnover in the country where a case is brought, not your global revenue, and enforcement so far is national and untested against a single hotel. But that’s cold comfort against a competitor complaint or a consumer group letter. So go and look. Search your own hotel name, read what your Booking.com listing and Google profile say about you, then find whoever holds the channel manager login and open the sustainability section. The need to get ahead of this has never been stronger.
Story 5
Airlines Are Merchandising Rings Around Hotels – The Numbers Prove It
IdeaWorksCompany’s annual Yearbook of Ancillary Revenue, published this week and covering 58 airlines on a like-for-like basis, found ancillary revenue grew 13.4% to $13.2 billion in 2025 – nearly double the 7.2% growth in total airline revenue. Around 30 airlines now generate at least $1 billion each in ancillary revenue, up from 27 a year ago. United led in absolute terms at $11.5 billion; Frontier led as a share of total revenue at 60.2%; Jet2.com topped the per-passenger table at $100.73; and Southwest, which only started charging for bags and seat assignment in 2025, saw ancillary revenue per passenger jump 20%. Report author Jay Sorensen attributes the growth chiefly to seat assignment fees and branded fares – not, interestingly, to artificial intelligence, which the report notes is conspicuously absent from airlines’ own financial filings despite the industry chatter.
The need for hotels to close this gap has never been stronger. Airlines have spent two decades building the booking engine into a genuine merchandising surface – seat maps, bundles, tiered fares, loyalty-card cross-sell – and the revenue keeps proving the model out, growing twice as fast as the base business it sits on top of. Most hotel booking engines, by contrast, still treat the reservation as a room-and-rate transaction with an upsell bolted on as an afterthought, if at all. Early check-in, guaranteed views, F&B credit, parking – these are all Jet2-style ancillary opportunities sitting inside your own direct channel, uncaptured.
Let’s look at what this actually means for your revenue strategy. This isn’t a call to copy airlines’ fee structure wholesale – guests tolerate baggage fees from a carrier they’ll never see again in a way they won’t tolerate nickel-and-diming from a hotel they’re staying three nights in. But the underlying discipline – merchandising optionality at the point of booking, measuring ancillary yield per booking the way airlines measure it per passenger – is one hospitality commercial teams are still years behind on. Don’t you think it’s time that changed?