Booking.com lawsuit could see Dutch travellers receive compensation

The Dutch Consumers’ Association (Consumentenbond), together with the Consumenten Competition Claims (CCC), has filed a mass claim against global hotel reservation site Booking.com over unlawful practices used to influence consumers. Anyone who has used the site since 2013 could receive a payout if the lawsuit is successful. 

Booking.com misleads consumers with fake discounts

According to the Dutch Consumers’ Association, Booking.com is abusing its power as the leading hotel reservation site, while restricting competition and misleading customers. “For example, the platform uses fake discounts, incomplete prices and made-up scarcity. With these kinds of “dark patterns”, Booking.com influences the choices that consumers make. And that is not allowed under Dutch and European regulations,” said director of the Consumers’ Association, Sandra Molenaar, in a news release. 

Several examples of unlawful practices have been gathered by the Dutch organisations, from failure to mention additional costs to making illegal agreements with accommodations so that they do not offer cheaper rooms or better conditions on their own websites. “Consumers have been paying too much for their hotel rooms for years. We have conducted research and it shows that Booking.com has been violating competition rules and consumer law since January 2013,” noted CCC chairman Bert Heikens.

Dutch Consumers’ Association files mass claim against Booking.com

To put a stop to this, the Dutch Consumers’ Association and the CCC are calling on any consumers in the Netherlands who have reserved a room via Booking.com since January 1, 2013, to register their claim with this link. This also applies to users of other booking sites such as Trivago, Agoda and Expedia, as consumers have also suffered damages while using them due to Booking’s actions keeping prices in the whole sector high. 

The online travel agency based in Amsterdam is being offered the chance to settle the mass claim outside of court, but if it chooses not to, the lawsuit will go ahead. As each customer has experienced different amounts of damages, each payout could vary from tens to several hundreds of euros, amounting to hundreds of millions of euros in total. 

This is not the first time the accommodation site has been in hot water. Last year, the European Court ruled that Booking.com violated the rules by imposing pricing restrictions on hotels, and Spain fined the company 413 million euros for this very same reason. In July 2024, the Dutch courts ruled that Booking.com had to join a pension scheme as it was not just an internet company but a travel agency.