MakeMyTrip-Goibibo and OYO: India's CCI fined their hotel squeeze Rs 392 crore

MMT-Go — MakeMyTrip and Goibibo — dominated India's market for online hotel booking intermediation through 2017-2020. Its hotel contracts imposed wide price parity and room-availability parity, funded deep discounts out of commissions, and carried exclusivity conditions such as the "D-minus" clause. Under a separate commercial arrangement with OYO, MMT-Go delisted OYO's rivals FabHotels and Treebo — and the independent hotels they franchised — from its portals in 2018.

The Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India complained to CCI in 2019. In its October 2022 order, CCI defined the market as online intermediation for hotel booking in India, found MMT-Go dominant, and held that parity plus deep discounting reinforced that dominance — muting rival platforms, deepening hotels' dependence, and funding discounts competitors could not match. Listings shown as "sold out" when merely delisted were exploitative; the OYO arrangement was an illegal vertical foreclosure.

The penalties were set at 5% of relevant turnover: Rs 223.48 crore for MMT-Go and Rs 168.88 crore for OYO — about $47 million combined, as Reuters reported. CCI also ordered behavioural fixes: scrap price and room parity and the D-minus exclusivity, grant hotels fair, transparent, non-discriminatory access, and disclose clearly which properties are merely delisted rather than sold out.

Rs 223.48 crore on MMT-Go and Rs 168.88 crore on OYO — 5% of relevant turnover each — plus orders to strip parity and exclusivity clauses from hotel contracts.

Price and room parity clauses stopped hotels from offering better rates or availability on rival OTAs, so competition between platforms froze while MMT-Go kept its network.

Deep discounts funded from hotel commissions made the hotels more dependent on MMT-Go and raised their costs, strengthening the bargaining imbalance.

The OYO arrangement delisted FabHotels, Treebo and their member hotels from the dominant channel, foreclosing competitors' market access.

Showing delisted hotels as "sold out" diverted consumers away from rivals and starved budget hotels of bookings — exploitative conduct on top of the exclusionary kind.

Parity clauses read like fairness until a regulator reads them as foreclosure. Punishing hotels for selling cheaper elsewhere is a rent on market power, and the bill comes as a cut of turnover.

FabHotels and Treebo had already been relisted in 2021 after CCI's intervention, and the order insisted relisting be on equitable terms. MMT-Go had to rewrite its hotel contracts to drop parity and exclusivity, and both companies were left contesting penalties calculated directly from the turnover of the very business the commission said they had shielded.