In a letter to the EU competition commissioner, 34 companies including TripAdvisor and Expedia claim Google unfairly promoted its holiday rental search engine
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a rerun of a playbook the comparison-shopping sector already ran: in late 2018, price comparison sites sent an open letter to the EU competition chief arguing Google had failed to give rivals equal treatment under the existing ruling. The new letter extends the same self-preferencing complaint to a fresh vertical — holiday rentals — with a broader coalition of 34 signatories including TripAdvisor and Expedia.
It lands while Brussels is already widening its Google file beyond search: the Commission opened an antitrust probe into whether Google favors its own display ad tech in mid-2021, so the travel letter adds political pressure at a moment when the enforcer is demonstrably willing to open new fronts.
First-order effects
- Google faces renewed scrutiny over whether its holiday rental search results favor its own product, with the EU competition commissioner now holding a signed demand from 34 companies including two of the largest online travel intermediaries.
Second-order effects
- Rival travel platforms gain leverage: Booking.com's fights on both sides of the ledger — contesting the EU's block of its €1.63B Etraveli acquisition and a provisional €486M Spanish fine — show European regulators are actively reshaping online travel power, and coordinated letters like this push them toward Google's search practices as the next target.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, EU enforcement against Google evolves from one-off rulings into rolling vertical-by-vertical campaigns — shopping, then ads, now travel — where each coalition letter becomes the trigger for a new investigation rather than the end of one.
The trend: European antitrust action against Google is shifting from single rulings to a sustained, coalition-driven campaign across each vertical where its search box competes with its own products.