European General Court Upholds Commission Veto of Booking Etraveli Deal

The General Court of the European Union has dismissed the action brought by Booking Holdings Inc. against the European Commission’s prohibition of its acquisition of Etraveli Group AB. The judgment of 9 September 2026 is published in the Official Journal of the European Union of 26 October 2026 as C/2026/5340, and it leaves standing Decision C(2023) 6376 final of 25 September 2023, which declared the concentration incompatible with the internal market and the functioning of the EEA Agreement in Case M.10615 – Booking Holdings/Etraveli Group.

The ruling closes a challenge lodged under Article 263 TFEU, the Treaty provision allowing annulment actions against acts of the Union institutions. The application had been notified in the Official Journal as early as 29 January 2024, under reference C/2024/973, and the language of the case was English throughout.

A three-point operative part

The published operative part of the judgment is short and leaves no room for ambiguity. The Court:

• dismisses the action in its entirety;
• orders Booking Holdings Inc. to bear its own costs and to pay those of the European Commission;
• orders Etraveli Group AB to bear its own costs.

No partial annulment, no referral back to the Commission and no interim measure survives the ruling: the 2023 prohibition decision stands as adopted.

The parties and who argued the case

The notice identifies the full cast of the proceedings, which pitted the world’s largest online travel group against the EU executive, with the target company siding with the buyer.

• Applicant: Booking Holdings Inc., incorporated in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States, represented by F. González Díaz and R. Snelders, lawyers, and D. Beard, Barrister-at-Law.
• Defendant: the European Commission, represented by F. Castillo de la Torre, P. Caro de Sousa, M. Domecq and T. Franchoo, acting as Agents.
• Intervener in support of the applicant: Etraveli Group AB, of Uppsala, Sweden, represented by C. Esteva Mosso, L. Crocco, S. Völcker, C. Malamataris and L. Bitsakou, lawyers.

What the Court was asked to review

The subject-matter headings recorded in the notice map the legal battleground. The dispute concerned the market for online travel agencies in the hotel sector, and the pleas were organised around the following points:

• the Guidelines on the assessment of non-horizontal mergers, the analytical framework applied to a transaction between a hotel-booking platform and a flight-booking business;
• the counterfactual scenario, that is, the competitive situation that would have prevailed without the merger;
• the finding of a significant impediment to effective competition;
• the efficiencies invoked by the notifying party.

By dismissing the action, the Court accepted none of the arguments advanced on those four fronts. The notice publishes the operative part and the classification of the case, not the reasoning developed in the full text of the judgment.

Why it matters beyond the parties

For digital platforms and online travel agencies, the outcome is a clear signal that the Commission’s prohibition of a non-horizontal acquisition can survive full judicial review, including on the two points where merging parties most often attack merger decisions: the choice of counterfactual and the rejection of efficiency claims. Any operator contemplating a vertical or conglomerate deal in the online intermediation space now has a confirmed precedent that the executive’s analytical framework, applied to hotel distribution and flight booking, holds up in court. The judgment also fixes the cost consequences: the losing applicant pays the Commission’s costs, while the intervening target bears its own.

Source: Official Journal of the European Union, C/2026/5340, 26 October 2026, C series (official reference: C/2026/5340; Case T-1139/23).