FAS IN THE MEDIA: THE COURT REJECTED THE BOOKING.COM APPEAL

The Ninth Arbitration Appeal Court dismissed Booking.com's appeal of the Moscow Arbitration Court’s decision, which had previously confirmed the legality of FAS’s infringement decision. This is provided in the materials of arbitration cases file.

The message states: ‘To keep the Court’s decision as it stands and to reject the appeal’.

At the end of August, the Moscow Arbitration Court dismissed Booking.com's appeal of FAS’s decision regarding the exclusion of broad and narrow parity clauses from Booking.com’s agreements with hotels, applying to both, the prices for hotel services and the conditions under which these services are provided.

Booking.com is planning to appeal the decision of the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal, as the company's press service told to TASS.

‘As a law-abiding company, we will work to cease parity clauses in Russia but at the same time we will prepare the appeal of today’s decision’, - the press service said.

The company is disappointed with today's decision, which in its view does not fully take into account the data provided by the platform on the market conditions and the industry's perceptions of parity clauses.

‘Parity clauses are necessary to prevent hotels from being able to enjoy all the services of our platform for free and then deliberately display unequal and higher prices on Booking.com, incentivizing customers to book rooms directly. This is not only unfair but also not in the travelers’ interests’, - the company said.

About the case

In December 2020, FAS initiated a case against Booking.com due to the imposition of parity condition on hotels and hostels. According to FAS, the service did not allow connected hotels to reduce prices on other channels. The company did not agree with FAS’s decision and filed an appeal on February 4, 2021.

On August 26, FAS fined Booking.com with the amount of 1.3 billion rubles for the abuse of its dominant position in the relevant Russian market. Subsequently, Booking.com appealed the fine to Moscow Arbitration Court.