Booking Holdings calls it the Connected Trip. A European court calls it a way into your hotel business.
Booking.com's owner fought three years to buy Europe's biggest flight seller. The case against the deal was that a bigger Booking.com is bad for hotels. The court found no proof of that, and blocked the deal anyway.
by Markus Busch
The ruling. On September 9 a European court upheld the decision that stopped Booking Holdings from buying Etraveli, the Swedish company behind Gotogate and Mytrip and Europe's biggest online seller of airline tickets. The deal was worth €1.63 billion. The European Commission killed it in 2023 to protect one market in particular, the online sale of hotel rooms. Three years of argument about who gets to sell your rooms, and no hotel was in it.
What the court says the flights are for. The judgment describes the plan using the company's own name for it. Buying Etraveli "forms part of its 'connected trip' strategy" — a run of travel services with flights as an essential part, built to win customers and keep them, which "would result in growth in its hotel business as a result of cross-selling of hotel rooms to flight customers." Flights, the court adds, is one of the few ways of winning hotel customers that Booking Holdings does not already dominate.
Sell the guest her flight and you are first in line to sell her the room.
The Connected Trip looks different from behind the front desk. Two bookings counted as one, and your night auditor delivering what the quarterly report counts. The court read the same plan from the other end.
What it could not find. Then the court turns on the Commission's own numbers. The Commission had worked out how much bigger Booking.com would get in hotel bookings once it owned the flight seller. The court called that sum "vitiated by a number of errors" and said the real gain might come to a few tenths of one percent.
It found no evidence that hotels would move more rooms onto Booking.com because of the deal. None that hotels would leave other OTAs. None that Booking Holdings could charge hotels a higher commission.
The harm it found instead. The block stands anyway. A deal can be stopped, the court says, even when nothing gets worse. It is enough that a bad situation is set in place and made harder to change. One very large seller. A long gap to the next. A set of services the others cannot match.
The damage isn't what you pay. It's that there is nowhere else to take the business.
Limits. Booking Holdings says it disagrees and is reading the judgment. It can still appeal to the Court of Justice, on points of law only. And a finding that something was not established in 2023 is a finding about what nobody proved. It is not a forecast.
Now look at what happened while the appeal ran. Airline tickets sold through Booking Holdings' sites, from its own annual filings: 36 million in 2023, 49 million in 2024, 68 million in 2025. On the day it announced the appeal it also announced it had extended its commercial deal with Etraveli through 2028. In June 2025 it extended again, by eight years.
The deal is still blocked. Booking.com has been selling the flights all along.
Read also: Booking.com counts a trip your night auditor has to deliver
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