“At least 15 days”: notice before a delivery platform changes your terms
Restaurant operators receive these notices and file them, which is usually right and occasionally very wrong. Article 3(2) of Regulation 2019/1150 requires a European platform to notify proposed changes to its terms on a durable medium, and sets a floor: the notice period “shall be at least 15 days from the date on which the provider of online intermediation services notifies the business users concerned about the proposed changes”. It also requires longer where the change forces you to adapt, and it treats the notice as a condition of the change rather than as a courtesy attached to it.
Why is fifteen days a floor rather than a rule?
Because fifteen days is the minimum the article sets, not the period every change earns. Article 3(2) says the notice “shall be at least 15 days from the date on which the provider of online intermediation services notifies the business users concerned about the proposed changes”, and it requires longer where the change forces you into technical or commercial adaptation.
So a change requiring you to reprice a menu, rebuild an integration or restructure how promotions are funded should carry more than fifteen days, and fifteen days for such a change is worth questioning.
What happens if they do not give proper notice?
The notice requirement is a condition of the change rather than a courtesy attached to it, so a change pushed through without proper notice is open to challenge on that ground alone.
That is worth knowing before you accept a change quietly. It does not mean you should ignore a badly notified change unilaterally, and it does mean the point is available in a complaint or a commercial conversation.
Can I leave instead?
The notice period exists so that you can decide, and leaving before it expires is one of the decisions available. Read your own platform’s clause for how it words that, because the terms are where the mechanism is spelled out.
The reverse also matters. Acting on the new terms early, rather than objecting, is the kind of thing a platform can later read as acceptance, so a change you disagree with should be answered in writing during the notice period.
Are there exceptions to the 15 day notice period?
Two, and both are narrow.
Where the platform is under a legal or regulatory obligation that does not allow it to respect the period. And where it has to move urgently against an unforeseen and imminent danger of the fraud, malware, spam, data breach or cybersecurity kind.
Neither covers a commercial change the platform wants to make quickly, which is what most of these notices are.
What should I actually do when one of these arrives?
Read it for three things, in fifteen minutes.
Whether anything changes commission, promotional funding or fees. Whether anything changes the conditions under which you can be restricted or closed. And whether anything requires work at your end, in which case the notice period should be longer than the minimum.
Most notices contain nothing that matters. The value of reading is finding the one that does, and the cost of missing it is discovering the change during a dispute months later.
Why does this connect to availability at all?
Because the conditions under which a listing can be closed or restricted live in these terms, and they change.
A change to closure grounds, to eligibility criteria for a programme you rely on, or to how availability is measured, is exactly the kind of thing that arrives in one of these notices and is never read. Then a site fails a rule nobody knew had moved.
Terms move and the storefront does not. What a customer could actually order, hour by hour, is the one series that survives a change of terms, and Kitchain (kitchain.co) holds it per site and per platform.