The funnel appears to have survived the veto

Most coverage on 9 September read the judgment as a merger-law story. The General Court upheld the Commission's 2023 prohibition of Booking's acquisition of Etraveli Group, endorsed a "reverse" leveraging theory of harm, and did so while finding that the Commission's calculations were "vitiated by a number of errors" and that Booking's added share of hotel OTA business "could be limited to a few tenths of a per cent" ¹.

What the coverage did not do is look at what happened, in the three years the case took, to the thing the Commission set out to protect. That is the second timeline.

The thesis of this column: the court has confirmed in law that a flight booking is a customer-acquisition channel for hotels, but the record suggests that much of the flight-to-hotel funnel the Commission blocked by merger was, on this publication's reading, assembled by contract and organic growth instead, so the live question for airlines is no longer whether Booking sells their seats but what they are paid for supplying the top of a funnel whose value lands downstream of the seat.

What the court accepted

The court's reasoning rests on Booking's "connected trip" strategy, in which flights are "an essential part" of offering a range of travel services "with the aim of acquiring customers and making them more loyal" ¹. It held that the deal would grow Booking's hotel business "as a result of cross-selling of hotel rooms to flight customers", and it gave weight to the fact that the growth would come through "one of the few channels for acquiring hotel customers which Booking does not yet dominate, namely flights" ¹.

The Commission had put the funnel in plainer terms in 2023. Flight OTA services are "often the first step in the planning of a trip", and among OTA services "flights have the highest chance to lead to the cross-selling of accommodation" ². It rejected Booking's proposed remedy, a choice screen of rival hotel offers on the flight check-out page, partly because that page "represents only a small share of the cross-sell opportunities", with emails and notifications left untouched ². The Commission also recorded that Booking already sourced its limited flight OTA offer in the EEA from eTraveli ².

The other timeline

25 September 2023. The Commission prohibits the deal ². The same day, Booking says the decision does not alter its commitment to its flights offering and that its commercial partnership with Etraveli Group is extended "through at least December 2028" ³. Booking later records a termination fee of $90 million, paid in October 2023 ⁴.

13 May 2024. The Commission designates Booking a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act for Booking.com's online intermediation service, with six months to comply; the duty to inform the Commission of intended concentrations applies at once ⁵.

9 July 2024. Ryanair announces Etraveli Group, including Mytrip and Gotogate, as an "Approved OTA" and says customers' contact and payment details will be passed to the airline ⁶.

26 August 2025. Ryanair signs a partnership with Booking Holdings covering Booking.com, KAYAK, Priceline and Agoda. Ryanair says customers will get myRyanair access without its verification step and receive flight updates directly ⁷.

Full year 2025. Booking reports 68 million airline tickets against 49 million in 2024, up 36.6%, "driven by the expansion of flight offerings at Booking.com and Agoda", and flight gross bookings up 29% ⁴.

19 December 2025. Italy's competition authority fines Ryanair €255,761,692 after finding that it abused a dominant position towards travel agencies ⁸. Ryanair called the ruling "bizarre/unsound" and said it had instructed its lawyers to appeal ⁹. In the decision, the authority states that Ryanair pays no commission to OTAs and that OTAs want to sell Ryanair anyway "in virtù dell'importanza dei contenuti per attrarre consumatori", because the content attracts consumers ⁸. It cites Booking.com's own analysis: among customers who bought at least two travel services on the same site, 74% of flight buyers also bought accommodation ⁸. That figure is pre-veto data: the authority notes that the material was cited in the public version of the Commission's 2023 merger decision ⁸. The decision also notes that eTraveli's sales data include sales through its partners, naming Booking.com as an example ⁸.

9 September 2026. The General Court rules ¹.

What the two timelines say together

The connection that follows is this publication's reading, not a statement by the court, the Commission, Booking or any airline.

The prohibition stopped ownership. On the record above, it does not appear to have stopped the funnel. It is confirmed that Booking said on the day of the veto that it had extended its supply contract with Etraveli Group to at least December 2028 ³, and the Italian authority's 2025 decision treats Booking.com as an eTraveli sales partner ⁸. A commercial supply contract is not a concentration, and no source consulted suggests the arrangement breaches the prohibition. It is also confirmed that Booking's flight volume grew by more than a third in 2025 ⁴. It is probable, though not established by any source consulted, that much of what the Commission feared from the merger, a large flight customer base feeding Booking's hotel business, has been pursued organically instead. Whether ownership would have made that faster is unresolved; the court itself thought the measurable increment small ¹.

The DMA is the second instrument in the room. It bars a gatekeeper from cross-using personal data from a designated core platform service in its other services without the user's consent, and from preventing business users offering different prices elsewhere ¹⁰. Booking says it has changed Booking.com to address both the parity ban and the rules on using data across services ⁴. Whether flights sold on Booking.com sit inside the designated service or count as a separate service, which decides how far the consent rule reaches the flight-to-hotel data flow, is unresolved from the public sources consulted here.

For airlines the useful part is the Italian record. An authority has now set down, in a decision the airline is contesting, that an airline's content is valuable to OTAs as a way to attract consumers rather than as a source of commission ⁸. If that holds, the seat is acquisition material for someone else's higher-margin vertical, and an airline negotiating with Booking over commission alone is negotiating over the smaller of the two values.

Ryanair's terms suggest what the other currency looks like. What it announced was not a fee but the customer: contact and payment details, account access, flight updates sent directly ⁶⁷. It is possible, not shown, that other carriers will price their indirect content the same way.

The pattern generalises on one condition: wherever the intermediary's main margin sits in a different vertical from the airline's product, the airline's bargaining power is the customer relationship and servicing access, not the distribution cost line.

What to watch

Two things are testable from public data.

First, Booking's 2026 annual report. If airline tickets keep growing at a rate comparable to 2025's 36.6% ⁴ with no acquisition, the reading that contract has replaced ownership gains weight. If growth stalls, ownership mattered more than this column assumes, and the prohibition did more work than it appears to.

Second, the next airline agreements with Booking Holdings. If they specify customer contact, data or servicing terms in the way Ryanair's did ⁷, airlines are pricing the funnel. If they speak only of content access and fares, the value of the top of the funnel is still being conceded downstream.

An appeal to the Court of Justice can be brought within two months and ten days of notification ¹. Whether Booking brings one will show how much it still values the ownership route.

The connection drawn between these timelines is this publication's reading, not a statement by the General Court, the European Commission, the Italian competition authority, Booking Holdings, Etraveli Group or Ryanair. Terminair carries no byline.