by By Foo Yun Chee
Luxembourg (Reuters)-Booking Holdings criticized on Tuesday an EU antitrustveto about his 1.63 billion-euro ($ 1.9 billion) Etraveli deal almost two years ago, saying that regulators had no clear, convincing evidence to show anti-competitive damage.
The American online travel company said that EU supervisors ignored precedents and did not perform a good analysis in their 2023 decision, which claimed that the proposed remedies of the booking were insufficient to tackle concern about his market power in online hotel reservations.
The EU competitive quote has increased its control of technical deals in recent years, with reference to concern about “killing acquisitions”, where dominant companies buy smaller rivals to eliminate competition or strengthen their market position.
“The committee has no clear and convincing evidence. They really have no good evidence. It is speculation,” lawyer Daniel Beard van Booking told the panel of five judges.
Beard argued that the European Commission did not correctly assess the market conditions with and without the merger and said: “You cannot use Buzz Words as a replacement for analysis – ecosystems, digital platforms, network effects. You still have to correctly identify the counterfactual, and the committee not”.
EU supervisors have blocked the deal because it would have created a travel ecosystem for books, which means that rivals cannot compete, said committee lawyer Mateo Domecq.
“The anchoring of the dominant position of booking stems from the fact that the transaction will make it more difficult for competitors to acquire and grow customers and hotels,” he said.
Booking, whose brands booking.com, Rentalcars, Priceline and Agoda are, the deal announced in November 2021.
The Swedish rival Etraveli, owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners, owns Gotogate and Mytrip and also operates Tripstack from the airline Distribution Services.
The case is T-1139/23 Booking Holdings against Commission.
($ 1 = 0.8511 euros)
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, editing by Louise Heavens)
