The law that just fined Google has been running on Booking.com since December 2024.

Booking lost the rate parity clause in December 2024, and the money moved to paid placement. Google's ruling is heading the same way.

by Markus Busch

Brussels fined Google €890 million on Thursday, €460 million of it for putting its own Shopping, Flights and Hotels above rival services in search. Google has sixty days to stop, and the fines keep running until it does.

Most of the industry will read that as a first look at what regulation does to hotel distribution. It isn't. The same law has already been run end to end on a company that sells your rooms, and the results have been in for a year and a half.

What the law already handed you

Brussels put Booking under this law in May 2024. The rules took effect in November, and on December 2, 2024 the rate parity clause came out of every European contract Booking holds — the standard ones and the negotiated ones, in every version the clause came in. Booking told the Commission it rewrote five standard agreements and issued more than seventy waivers to get it done.

What that gave you is not small. You can charge less on your own website than you charge on Booking.com, in all twenty-seven member states, and Booking is barred from doing anything about it. Margrethe Vestager, who ran the file, said businesses were now "free to differentiate prices and conditions on any online sales channel."

There is a second right, quieter and probably worth more. The platform has to give you your own numbers back — free, live, and continuously. Your bookings, your cancellations, what people looked at before they booked. It sits in Article 6(10) of the Digital Markets Act, and it is worth naming to your market manager by number, because that is the language on their side of the call.

Booking then went further than it had to. It told the Commission its ranking ignores what you charge anywhere else, and it dropped rate parity as a condition of getting into Genius, Preferred and Preferred Plus.

So the clause is gone, the penalty for breaking it is gone, and the data pipe is open. On paper, this is the fight the industry spent fifteen years asking for.

The lever the ruling left alone

Now look at what none of it touched.

A rule against a platform favoring itself governs the order things appear in for free. It says nothing about the order things appear in when somebody pays. Position is still for sale, and selling it is still perfectly legal.

Follow that through. Take away the platform's power over your rate, take away its ability to quietly put itself first in the free listings, and the one lever left on the board is the one you rent.

It is where Booking's business has gone since 2024, and it is why the parity fight ended without the result hotels expected. The clause was never the machinery. The machinery is position on a page you don't own, and position was always for sale.

Which changes what your new right is worth. You can undercut Booking on your own site. That does not make your room easier to find. It makes the cheaper room harder to find, because the guest is looking at the page where placement is bought, and you are the one property on it not bidding.

The same shape, arriving in the assistant

Read Thursday's ruling against that and it stops looking new.

Google was fined for putting its own travel products first in the free results. What it has done about that so far is add boxes for the comparison sites and build new ad slots beside them. The free order gets fairer. The position that wins the booking stays for sale.

Then look at what Google is building. In November, Julie Farago, its vice president for travel and local search, described booking flights and hotels inside AI Mode itself, with Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott, IHG, Choice Hotels and Wyndham as launch partners. Google is not the one taking the money. The partner runs the transaction and carries the trouble when it goes wrong.

On that screen Google runs no hotel business of its own to put first, so the rule it was just fined under has very little to grab hold of. What it has instead is one answer where there used to be ten links. Fewer slots, each worth more, handed out by whatever method the parties settle on. Thursday's decision notes that Google has already sent Brussels its proposals for how the ruling applies to AI Mode, and that the conversation continues. The rules for that screen are being written now, and Google wrote the first draft.

More assistants, one source

One piece of last week's regulation matters more to your future bookings than Thursday's fine does.

On July 16, Brussels ordered Google to open up the phone: rival AI assistants get the same access to Android features and the same voice activation as Gemini by the middle of 2027. And from January 2027, Google has to hand rival search engines and qualifying AI chatbots a stripped-down feed of what people searched, what they clicked, and which hotels it ranked where.

Read that from behind your desk. The number of assistants a traveler might ask is about to go up, by law. What all of them know about your hotel increasingly comes out of one pipe.

If your property is thin in that record today — a handful of reviews, half a profile, not much written about you anywhere a crawler goes — the law is about to copy that thinness to every newcomer that asks for the feed. What is being created here is competition between assistants. Not competition between the hotels they name.

What to do about it this week

Two things, and neither of them is waiting.

Use what you already have. Price your own site under Booking where the math works. And ask Booking for your data, because it is free, it is yours, and most hoteliers have never once requested it. That feed is the only part of this whole arrangement the law handed you outright.

Then stop reading each ruling as rescue. Brussels has now twice put a platform under rules against favoring itself, and twice the result has been a fairer free listing sitting on top of a market in paid position. Your hotel is not a party to either case. It is the thing being ranked, and the price of being ranked well has never once come down.

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