Hungarian competition watchdog GVH has fined Booking.com £6.1m, describing the group as using “aggressive sales methods”.
The OTA said that it was “disappointed” by the decision.
According to the decision of the competition authority, Booking.com engaged in “unfair commercial practices against consumers by, among other things, misleadingly advertising some of its accommodations with a free cancellation option and exerting undue psychological pressure on consumers to make early bookings.”
Booking.com said: “Everything on our website, including how we display prices and payment policies as well as the availability and popularity of specific properties, among other features relevant to the customer booking experience, is intended to help customers.”
The GVH began its investigation in 2018, and reported three infringements. Firstly: in television and internet advertisements promoting its services, it said that the company placed particular emphasis on the "free cancellation" of accommodation. Consumers were in fact only able to make use of this option for a limited period of time and paid a higher price than for the same accommodation without the option of "free cancellation", i.e. the free price was included in the price of the accommodation concerned.
Secondly: in connection with the accommodation offers available on the Booking.com website and through the Booking.com mobile application, it said that the undertaking adopted pressure selling tactics at each stage of the accommodation search and booking process. This took the form of the use of attention grabbing (striking in colour, font size or other characteristic) information (e.g. "32 more people are also watching"; "One person is considering booking this accommodation right now", "Highly sought after! Booked 17 times in the last 24 hours"), which, it said, gave consumers the impression that the accommodation they were viewing was subject to high demand and limited availability.
The GVH said: “This practice is likely to exert psychological pressure and disrupts the consumer decision-making process, as it subconsciously evokes emotions and fears in consumers that if they do not book the accommodation as soon as possible they may lose out on it (a phenomenon described in the literature as the FOMO effect). All this distorts the consumer’s transactional decision.”
The organisation added that the company had not exercised the required level of professional care when displaying the offers of Hungarian accommodation providers when listing the Széchenyi Pihenőkártya (Széchenyi Recreation Card, ‘SZÉP Kártya’) as a preferred means of payment. It said that the availability of this payment method was not displayed to consumers in the same way and location for all of the accommodation establishments accepting the SZÉP Kártya, thereby possibly distorting their decisions.