GVH: Airbnb may be deceiving Hungarian users

The GVH recalled in its statement on Thursday that special attention has been paid to the online accommodation brokerage market in recent years, and Airbnb is not the first time that the national competition authority has come under its sights.

Accommodation can be rented and booked through Airbnb’s online accommodation brokerage platform. The company was founded in San Francisco, California, in August 2008. The site currently has more than 2 million listings in 34,000 cities in 191 countries around the world. It started its operations in Hungary in the early 2010s, and the average number of visits to its Hungarian-language website exceeded 500,000 per month between April and June 2025.

The competition supervision procedure is justified by the fact that the GVH has noticed that the policies and other user information available on the website and mobile application of Airbnb Ireland (a subsidiary of Airbnb) are extensive and fragmented, contradictory, and in some cases are only available in English. Thus, the company is likely not informing consumers in accordance with the requirements of professional diligence about the terms and conditions of its service, in particular with regard to the request for accommodation booking and the refund – the competition authority indicated.

The GVH has also noticed that Airbnb Ireland is likely to fail to display the essential feature on its website and mobile application that certain accommodations can also be booked on other platforms, or even on the accommodation advertisers’ own online platforms, thus, according to the competition authority, the company is withholding significant information from consumers.

With all this, Airbnb Ireland is likely to engage in unfair commercial practices and is likely to mislead consumers – the competition authority wrote.

The initiation of competition supervision proceedings does not mean that the undertaking has committed the infringement. The proceedings are aimed at clarifying the facts and thereby proving the alleged infringement. The period granted for the conduct of the proceedings is three months, which may be extended twice, in justified cases, by a maximum of two months each time.