The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has published the preliminary results of an investigation into agreements between Booking.com and Expedia (the online travel agents) and Intercontinental Hotels Group. The provisional findings of the OFT are that the agreements restrict the ability of the agents to discount the price of room-only offers, meaning that they infringe competition law as they restrict price competition and create barriers to market entry and expansion for other online travel agents who seek to offer discounts to consumers.
Each company has three months within which to respond to the allegations. If infringement of competition law is proven, the companies could each be fined up to 10% of worldwide annual turnover.