A fine punishes. It pays nothing back.

Picture this: July 2024, and the owner of a boutique hotel in Marbella reads that Spain’s competition authority, the CNMC, has fined Booking €413 million. For a moment, the owner wonders whether some of that money will find its way back to hotels. It will not. A competition fine punishes the company that broke the rules. It compensates no one.

What an injured hotel does have is something else: the right to claim. That right comes with time limits, it needs evidence, and it is almost never mentioned when the headline appears.

What the CNMC sanctioned.

On 30 July 2024, the CNMC fined Booking €413.24 million for two abuses of a dominant position since at least 1 January 2019, with a share of between 70% and 90% of online hotel booking intermediation in Spain. Among the terms it found unfair: stopping hotels from being cheaper on their own website while Booking kept the right to cut the hotel’s price on the platform on its own initiative; requiring disputes to be settled in English, under Dutch law and before the courts of Amsterdam; and giving too little information about the impact and profitability of its Preferred, Preferred Plus and Genius programmes.

Booking appealed to Spain’s National High Court, which suspended the fine as an interim measure in March 2025 while it decides the appeal. As far as I have been able to check, there is no judgment yet, so the decision is not final.

The fine is not yours. The claim may be.

If your hotel is in Spain, the Competition Act gives any person or company harmed by a competition infringement the right to full compensation from the infringer before the civil courts: the loss suffered, the profit lost and interest. The claim is time-barred after five years, but the clock stops while a competition authority investigates, and starts again one year after its decision becomes final. Once it is final, an infringement found by a Spanish authority is treated as irrefutable in a damages action.

In practice, for a hotel, this means the clock does not run the same way for everyone, and what you can prove in a few years depends on what you keep today. Commission invoices, screenshots of price cuts you did not authorise, the cost of each visibility programme. Whether a claim is worth bringing, and for how much, is for a competition lawyer to assess. What no one can do for you is rebuild the documents of 2024 in 2029.

The European front.

On 19 September 2024, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled that parity clauses, wide or narrow, cannot in principle be treated as ancillary restraints, because it has not been shown that they are objectively necessary or proportionate. In December 2025, a court in Berlin ordered Booking to pay damages to the German hotels that had sued it over those clauses, in a judgment that is not yet final and that Booking disputes.

The collective route runs through Amsterdam. In January 2026, a Dutch foundation, the Stichting Hotel Claims Alliance, filed a damages claim there on behalf of 3,087 hotels, backed by the European hospitality association HOTREC and more than thirty national associations. By August the number had reached 10,783, the foundation was preparing a third and final extension to around 18,000, and the Swiss hotel press gave 11 September 2026 as the last day for Swiss hotels to register. If your hotel is not in, ask your association whether any route remains open. An individual claim under Spanish law is a separate route, with its own time limits.

The same front has brought a practical change. On 28 September 2026, the European Commission published the measures Booking has introduced after its dialogue with the Commission under the Digital Markets Act. The prices a hotel offers off the platform do not count for the default ranking, nor for joining Genius, Preferred or Preferred Plus, and now no longer for Booking Sponsored Benefit either. Booking has also removed the “competitive” and “non-competitive” price labels from its extranet. The fear that a better price on your own website will cost you visibility now has a written answer.

The Swiss front.

In May 2025, the Swiss Price Supervisor, known as Monsieur Prix, ordered Booking to cut its commissions to Swiss hotels by almost a quarter, to a maximum average of 10.3% of the price of a night, for three years. Booking appealed to the Federal Administrative Court. According to the authority itself, the appeal was still pending in October 2025, and I have found no later judgment. The same ruling contains a passage few people quote: abolishing parity clauses is unlikely to strengthen competition substantially, and Germany’s competition authority found that Booking suffered no losses there after dropping narrow parity. On the contrary, it strengthened its position.

One more detail for hotels in Switzerland. According to the Commission itself, the September 2026 changes apply to properties in the European Economic Area, and Switzerland is not part of it. There, the parity ban comes from the Unfair Competition Act, in force since December 2022, and what Booking does with a Swiss hotel’s ranking is something to ask, not to assume.

The clause is gone. The commission is not.

Where I stand.

I would not build a strategy on a judgment. These proceedings take years, and the CNMC decision is not even final. But I would not let a right slip away for want of paperwork either. The sensible course is to do both at once: document as if you were going to claim, and sell as if you were never going to collect. A court may one day give you back a commission. Only your own channel can save you the next one.

What I would check.

• An evidence folder. Commission invoices since 2019, contracts and accepted terms, correspondence with the platform.
• The price cuts you did not decide. Every time your price appeared lower on the platform without you setting it, with date and screenshot.
• The performance of Genius and Preferred. The extra commission paid against the bookings that, on your own figures, they bring in.
• What your extranet now shows. The new Booking Sponsored Benefit performance data and the explanations of the score that decides whether you stay in the programmes.
• Your association. Which collective actions exist, who is in them and what their deadlines are.

Where to start.

1. This week

   Open the folder

   Download commission invoices and statements for recent years while they are still easy to reach.

2. This month

   Measure the programmes

   Work out what each booking attributed to Genius or Preferred really costs, extra commission included.

3. This quarter

   Talk to a specialist

   A competition lawyer or your hotel association, with the figures in front of you.

4. Every season

   Review each channel’s share

   If your dependence falls, any future judgment becomes a bonus, not a rescue.

A fine imposed on someone else does not pay your bills. But it raises a question few hotels ask out loud: how much did the years cost you when you could not offer a better price on your own website than on the platform?

You may never know exactly. But if you kept the commission invoices from those years, you already have something many hotels have not opened yet. Do you know where that folder is?

If you would like me to review your website and your direct channels with these numbers in front of us, start with the Strategic Diagnostic. Whether your hotel can claim, and how much, is for a competition lawyer to decide, not a designer.