COMPETITION PROTECTION IN THE TOURISM SECTOR IN ITALY 353 that the required measures for this purpose would be adopted starting from 1 August 2015 for a period of 5 years and applied to all hotels in the European Economic Area. On 1 August 2015, Expedia began to apply the measures to the ongoing agreements with the partner hotels located in the European Economic Area, clarifying that these changes would also be applied to any possible extension or new agreement concluded with them within 5 years. In particular, as regards the ongoing agreements, Expedia has implemented a unilateral termination of the MFN clauses. Therefore, with the final act of the investigation against Expedia, the Authority ascertained that the original context had significantly changed due to all the measures adopted by the Party, and therefore considered that there was no longer any ground for investigation against Expedia43. 3.14. Based on what emerged from these two investigations, ICA started monitoring alongside other Authorities the conduct recorded in 2016 in the online hotel booking sector. The monitoring activity – also attended by the European Commission and nine other national competition authorities (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, United Kingdom and Sweden) – aimed to assess if some measures adopted in recent years (following various antitrust interventions by Member States) affected how hotels offered their rooms online to consumers. In particular, this analysis mainly focused on the changes made to the parity clauses (also called the MFN clauses) contained in the standard contracts between some OTAs (including Booking.com and Expedia) and partner hotels. More specifically, an electronic questionnaire was prepared and sent to a sample of 16.000 hotels located in the ten participating Member States, and a further standard questionnaire to 20 online travel agencies, 11 metasearch websites and 19 large hotel chains. The results suggested that both types of antitrust measures adopted – which entailed a significant reduction in the scope of the MFN clauses (allowing online booking platforms to maintain parity solely with respect to online reservations made directly on hotel portals) or the absolute prohibition of them– have generally improved competitive conditions and offered consumers a better set of choices. 43 ICA Decision no. 25940 of 23 March 2016, in Bull. no 11/2016.
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