Brussels Asks Whether a Boosted Booking.com Listing Should Say It Paid

The European Commission has opened formal proceedings against Booking.com under the Digital Services Act, and one of its suspicions fits in a single sentence. Listings whose providers paid for a higher ranking in search results may not have been clearly labelled as ads. The Commission opened the proceedings on 21st October, and Travel Weekly reported them the following day.

Two suspicions and a request for priority

The Commission describes the action as an in-depth investigation to be carried out as a matter of priority. It suspects that Booking.com may not have diligently assessed or effectively mitigated the risks related to fraudulent listings and phishing scams. The probe will also examine how reservation and guest data is shared with accommodation providers, along with the design of the Booking.com messaging service.

The second suspicion concerns ranking. As Travel Weekly reports it, the Commission's position is that users should be able to clearly recognise boosted listings as advertisements. Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's executive vice president, gave the wider aim in one line, saying "Europeans should be able to book their holidays without fear of being scammed."

A suspicion with a long road ahead

The Commission says that opening proceedings does not pre-judge any final outcome or decision. Booking.com has said it is "co-operating fully with the European Commission and engaging constructively on its questions under the Digital Services Act". The steps open to the Commission include interim measures, non-compliance decisions and acceptance of commitments from Booking.com, and none has been taken. Nothing has been found, and nothing here should be read as a finding.

The first room a guest enters

For a hotel, the booking listing is the first room a guest enters, and it is furnished in part by a platform. A ranking position reads as a judgement of quality, so whether a guest can tell that the position was bought matters to the property at the end of the listing as much as to the platform that sold it.

A hotel controls its lobby, its check-in script and the room rate at six in the evening. It has far less say over the page that set the expectation all of those are measured against, and over the messages that arrive in the days before the guest does.

Strategic Read

Neon Lace interpretation

A Guest Read for a hotel operator would lay the booking-platform listing beside the arrival and read the two against each other. It would record which promise the listing makes first, which photographs lead, what the pre-arrival messages say, and where the front desk inherits an expectation it did not write. For a property that uses a boosted listing, it would add whether a guest looking at the page could have told.

A regulator is now asking whether a guest can tell that a position was bought. The guest, meanwhile, will arrive at the front desk with whichever answer was assumed.