Britain’s consumer watchdog has alleged InterContinental Hotels Group and two leading online travel agents broke competition law by signing deals that limited the discounts offered on hotel rooms.
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said yesterday that InterContinental's deals with Booking.comand Expedia could limit price competition and create barriers for new entrants to the market by discouraging online agents from using sales commission to reduce prices for customers.
In a statement resulting from an investigation started in 2010, the watchdog said that its provisional view was that the hotelier and the two agents had infringed competition law with practices that were potentially widespread in the industry. The deal between InterContinental and Booking.comis still in place, the OFT said. Expedia's alleged infringement occurred between October 2007 and September 2010.
The inquiry was in response to a complaint by a small hotel-booking website, Skoosh.com, which claimed various hotel chains were preventing it from offering discounted prices. – (Reuters)