EU court upholds the Etraveli block, and Booking now has to build the Connected Trip rather than buy it

If you sell through both of the big Western OTAs, this ruling changes which of them can grow by acquisition in Europe — and therefore which one is likely to be assembling new booking surfaces around your inventory over the next few years.

On 9 September 2026 the EU General Court, sitting in an extended formation of five judges, dismissed in its entirety Booking Holdings' action against the European Commission's 2023 decision prohibiting its roughly €1.63 billion ($1.9 billion) acquisition of Etraveli, the Swedish flights specialist (Case T-1139/23).

The theory of harm

The Commission's case — now endorsed by the court — was not that Booking would dominate flights. It was the reverse. Flight bookings are a low-margin product that works as a customer-acquisition channel, funnelling travellers into Booking's high-margin hotel business. Buying Etraveli would therefore have reinforced Booking's grip on the market where the Commission had already found it holds a "dominant position": online travel agency distribution in the hotel sector.

The court found the regulator "correctly found" that Booking's already dominant position in hotel OTA distribution would have been strengthened, and that the combination could substantially hinder competition across the European Economic Area.

This is the first ruling by the EU courts on a conglomerate merger prohibition built on a reverse-leveraging theory — where the acquirer uses a market in which it is not dominant as a lever into one where it is.

The asymmetry it creates

The practical effect is a two-tier merger regime in European travel. A company the Commission treats as dominant faces close scrutiny on adjacent-category deals. A challenger does not.

Expedia Group has spent 2026 doing more or less what Booking wanted to do. It acquired Tiqets, the attractions platform, for roughly $279 million, and CarTrawler, the B2B ground-transport specialist, for roughly $350 million. Both deals pursue the same one-stop-shop logic; neither was prohibited, because Expedia is not deemed dominant in Europe.

Booking, meanwhile, has to assemble its Connected Trip organically — building flights, ground transport and attractions in-house rather than buying them.

What happens next

Booking retains a distribution partnership with Etraveli, which is the pattern the ruling arguably pushes the market toward: partnerships and deep integrations instead of outright acquisitions. Booking is weighing an appeal to the Court of Justice, the EU's highest court, which would either cement the reverse-leveraging standard or reopen it.

The reasoning is not confined to travel. Any platform that regulators consider dominant in one market — Skift raises Uber as an example — now faces a harder path to a superapp strategy in Europe if it tries to get there by acquisition.