The EU General Court upheld regulators' decision to block Booking Holdings' roughly €1.63 billion acquisition of the travel booking platform, leaving the merger's fate to a possible further appeal.
The European Union's General Court has upheld the European Commission's decision to block Booking Holdings' proposed acquisition of eTraveli, a deal valued at approximately €1.63 billion. The ruling keeps in place the Commission's original finding that the combination would have raised competition concerns in the online travel booking market.
For Booking, the ruling closes off one avenue for reviving the deal as originally structured, though the company retains the option of a further appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's highest court, within a window of roughly two months and ten days from formal notification of the ruling. Whether Booking intends to pursue that appeal has not yet been confirmed by the company.
The decision is a reminder that European competition authorities have continued to apply close scrutiny to consolidation among online travel and booking platforms, an industry where regulators have repeatedly focused on the market power that comes from controlling both a large customer-facing booking platform and the underlying inventory or aggregation technology beneath it. A blocked deal that survives a first-level court challenge tends to carry extra weight as a signal to other companies in the sector about the level of scrutiny similar tie-ups are likely to face.
For Booking shareholders, the direct financial exposure from the blocked deal itself is limited, since the acquisition never closed and no integration costs were incurred. The more relevant takeaway is strategic: the company's options for expanding through acquisition within the European online travel sector look more constrained than they did before the Commission's original decision, and the ruling adds a further data point suggesting large platform companies operating in Europe should expect continued regulatory resistance to deals that would meaningfully increase their control over adjacent parts of the travel booking value chain.