Unclear fee clauses can be voided: what Lithuania’s first P2B ruling means for platforms

Lithuania’s Competition Council has ruled, for the first time, that a booking platform’s fee clause was too vague to be enforceable and ordered it rewritten within two months. No fine was imposed, but the case sets the bar for what “plain and intelligible” actually means for any platform that charges business users variable or conditional fees.

What happened

On 15 September 2026, the Lithuanian Competition Council found that Treatwell LT, UAB, which runs a booking platform for salons, spas and similar businesses, breached the EU’s Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2019/1150).

The issue: Treatwell’s terms let it charge business users a commission on bookings that customers cancelled or didn’t show up for, if a business user’s cancellation rate crossed an internal threshold, or if Treatwell “reasonably suspected” the business was gaming the system. The catch – that threshold and those suspicion criteria were never disclosed to business users. They had no way to predict when, or why, the fee would apply to them.

A later version of the terms disclosed that Treatwell monitored cancellation rates and could lift the fee if things improved but still didn’t say what the threshold was, or what “improved” meant. The Council found that wasn’t good enough either.

Why it failed the test

The P2B Regulation requires platforms to write their terms in plain, intelligible language, specifically so that business users, including small operators without in-house legal support, can understand upfront the essential conditions of the service, including what it will cost them and why.

The Council’s reasoning was straightforward: telling business users a monitoring mechanism exists isn’t the same as telling them how it works. Without the actual criteria, the fee could be applied unpredictably, and under the Regulation, a clause that fails this test isn’t just a compliance problem. It’s legally void.

No fine but a warning shot

Despite finding a breach, the Council didn’t fine Treatwell. Two reasons stood out:

• This is the Council’s first substantive ruling under the P2B Regulation since it took on supervision duties in January 2025; there was no prior precedent for the industry to follow.
• Treatwell had already voluntarily rewritten several other flagged clauses (on reviews, terminations, and data access) before the investigation concluded.

The Council also dropped several other parts of its inquiry, including whether Treatwell gave proper notice before changing the fee clause on the basis that pursuing them further wasn’t a good use of its resources relative to the benefit, a filtering tool it has under Lithuania’s national P2B enforcement law.

Treatwell must still redraft the cancellation-fee clause within two months or face a daily fine of EUR 200 for non-compliance.

What this means for your business

Any platform that charges business users a fee tied to performance, behaviour, or an internal review process – not just booking platforms – should treat this as a checklist:

• Name the trigger. If a fee kicks in based on a threshold, rate, or score, say what it is, not just that one exists.
• Define the exit. If a fee can be lifted on improvement, define what counts as improvement.
• Don’t rely on “reasonable suspicion”. Discretion-based language without stated criteria is exactly what got flagged here.
• Review clauses proactively. Treatwell avoided a fine partly by fixing other flagged terms before the case closed; waiting for a regulator to ask is the more expensive path.

Bottom line

This is the first time Lithuania’s Competition Council has applied the P2B Regulation’s “plain and intelligible” standard to a platform’s fee structure, and it won’t be the last. The message for any business running an online marketplace or booking platform: vague monetisation clauses carry real legal risk, independent of whether the underlying fee itself is reasonable.

Based on: Lithuanian Competition Council, Decision No. 1S-104 (2026), 15 September 2026 (infringement of Article 3(1)(a), Regulation (EU) 2019/1150).