Duff on Hospitality Law

Happy Monday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 19, 2025, is below. This week’s Update features a heavy concentration of important legal updates on local Chinese efforts to investigate the practices of OTAs, the FTC’s newly announced investigation into Instacart and its alleged surveillance pricing practices and an important German court decision that may have wide ranging effects across Europe on pending class actions against Booking.com. Enjoy.

• • ChatGPT’s App Store Is Open for Business – Everyone’s Business. OpenAI announced this past week that it is now allowing third party developers to build and list apps inside ChatGPT. Once approved, the apps will be listed in ChatGPT’s App Directory. Users can summon these news apps via the ChatGPT tools menu, via @mentions or when ChatGPT deems the app relevant to the current session. In theory, a single vacation planning session could trigger multiple travel apps – competing OTAs, suppliers, etc. So much for ChatGPT’s initial pilot partners – Expedia and Booking.com – and let the battle for session relevance among competing apps on ChatGPT begin.
  • FTC Launches Investigation into Instacart Pricing Practices. It was just two weeks ago that we committed to exploring further the practice of personalized (or “surveillance”) pricing, its use in online transactions (specifically travel) and likely regulation. With the addition of personalized pricing to our daily news searches, my inbox is already being inundated with personalized pricing stories and newly announced regulations. Instacart has featured prominently these past two weeks as a study two weeks ago claimed to demonstrate the wide variety in pricing among users for the same items and then this week, likely in reaction to the announced study, the FTC has reportedly sent Instacart a civil investigation demand to investigate the online retailer’s pricing practices.
  • German Court Allows Hoteliers’ Claims Against Booking.com To Proceed. In a ruling last week, a Berlin court found that Booking.com’s use of rate parity provisions between January 2013 and January 2016 restricted German hotels’ ability to set competitive prices in violation of EC competition laws. According to the court’s decision, the OTA’s use of both broad parity provisions and later, narrow party provisions, unlawfully constrained hotels’ pricing freedom. The ruling clears the way for nearly 1,100 German hotels to proceed with competition claims against the OTA. The Berlin court’s decision follows an earlier 2024 decision by the European Court of Justice that found that Booking.com’s use of rate parity provisions violated competition law across Europe. This latest decision could prove quite helpful to other EU hoteliers and their pending class action claims against Booking.com arising, in part, out of its use of the same rate parity provisions.

Have a great week everyone, and Happy Holidays.