EU blocked Booking's €1.6B eTraveli deal; General Court upheld first conglomerate ban

On September 25, 2023, the European Commission blocked Booking Holdings' proposed €1.6 billion acquisition of eTraveli, a leading flight-OTA in the European Economic Area — the EC's first-ever prohibition based solely on conglomerate effects. Booking was already the dominant online travel agency for hotels in the EEA; eTraveli did not compete with it in hotel bookings. The Commission concluded the deal would still impede competition by strengthening Booking's hotel OTA dominance: owning a major flight OTA would bolster its travel ecosystem and funnel more traffic to its platform.

On September 9, 2026, the EU General Court dismissed Booking's challenge. It endorsed the Commission's 'reverse leveraging' theory, holding that an adjacent-market acquisition which adds even a few tenths of a per cent to a dominant firm's share can be decisive where strong network effects entrench dominance and make the market less contestable. The court also rejected Booking's counterfactual arguments and its efficiency defense: alleged cost savings were not shown to reach consumers, and customers who might benefit in the flight OTA market were not the ones harmed in the hotel OTA market.

The court added that the Commission's 2008 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines do not exhaust its theories of harm, approving entrenchment as a standalone theory. With the EC finalising revised merger guidelines, the judgment signals more interventions based on ecosystems, data advantages and customer-acquisition channels in digital platform markets — exactly the route Booking's deal ran into.

€1.6 billion acquisition prohibited; the first EU ban based solely on conglomerate effects, upheld by the General Court on September 9, 2026.

The acquisition would have put one of the few remaining customer-acquisition channels in flights into the hands of the hotel-OTA dominant.

In a market with strong network effects, even a small share increment reduces the contestability that disciplines a dominant firm.

Booking's efficiency defense failed the evidentiary bar: savings were neither verifiable and merger-specific nor shown to be passed on to consumers.

Booking litigated the novel theory rather than restructuring the deal, and lost a precedent-setting case that lowered the intervention bar for everyone.

When you already dominate a market, buying an adjacent customer-acquisition channel can be blocked even for a marginal share gain: regulators now police ecosystem entrenchment, not just market share.

Booking's application for annulment was dismissed in full on September 9, 2026, leaving the September 2023 prohibition standing. WilmerHale's analysis calls the judgment a pivotal shift in merger control: the EC may prohibit deals based on ecosystem strengthening and reduced market contestability even without horizontal or vertical overlaps, and without demonstrating a dramatic share increase.