It's 1:30 AM, and you're lying in bed searching for flight tickets. A quick scroll reveals a fare that seems "just right," and you breathe a sigh of relief: "Alright, I'll buy it." You think you're purchasing a ticket, but in reality, you're buying a label – "someone who doesn't like hassle," "someone who avoids trouble," "someone highly likely to pay directly." Then, the next day, you search for the same flight at the same time on a friend's phone, and the price seems to be from another world: one person sees 899 yuan, another sees 1564 yuan. The difference isn't just money; it's a measure of your worth in the system's eyes – whether you're deemed worthy of being charged more. In complaints compiled by media, similar cases have appeared: for the same China Eastern Airlines flight MU9721 (Dali to Nanjing), different mobile phones or accounts displayed significantly different prices, and the price even changed after a user complained.
Many people instinctively try to justify the platform's actions: Is it a coupon issue? A channel issue? Real-time fluctuations? Yes, flight and hotel prices are inherently volatile. But the problem lies in this – when price changes start binding to your personal profile rather than to shifts in market supply and demand, market behavior vanishes, replaced by an algorithmic black box. Consider another complaint: a user purchased tickets separately on Trip.com, and within hours, the price for the same flight dropped, with the single-ticket price difference even amounting to hundreds of yuan; the platform's explanations varied, but what infuriates consumers most is this: I have no way to verify whether what you're saying is true or false.
Hotels are even more ruthless because the practice is more concealed. You're not booking a "room"; you're booking "how much you are willing to pay for this room." Descriptions of different prices for the same room type in the same hotel, with differences of 200 yuan per night, repeatedly appear in complaint narratives. You want evidence? You take a screenshot. The platform blames "system reasons." You screenshot again, and the price changes once more. You contact customer service, and they tell you to "understand market fluctuations." You eventually realize the most frightening aspect isn't that it happens every single time, but that when it does happen, you have almost no ability to prove it occurred.
This is precisely why I say: Trip.com's issues cannot be resolved by simply "letting it off with a symbolic penalty of three cups of wine." Because it's not a one-off service failure, not an operational mishap, but a business model that uses technology to institutionalize "differential treatment": tailoring offers based on the customer and quietly reaping extra profits (This is the main point; time-pressed readers can stop here).
First, let's state the most glaring fact: Trip.com is immensely profitable. Trip.com Group achieved net revenue of 53.3 billion yuan in 2024, with a net profit of 17.2 billion yuan, and cash and equivalents totaling approximately 90 billion yuan. Calculate the net profit margin: 17.2/53.3, approximately 32%. This isn't just "making money"; it's "printing money."
Comparing with domestic peers, Tongcheng Travel disclosed 2024 revenue of about 17.34 billion yuan, with an adjusted net profit of approximately 2.79 billion yuan, resulting in an adjusted net profit margin of 16.1%. In other words, running on the same travel industry track, Trip.com's profit margin is like folding someone else's single towel into a thick quilt for itself.
Looking at US counterparts, Booking Holdings (parent of Booking.com) reported 2024 revenue of approximately $23.739 billion, with a net profit of about $5.882 billion, yielding a net profit margin of around 24.8%. Expedia's 2024 revenue was approximately $13.691 billion, with a net profit of about $1.234 billion, resulting in a net profit margin of about 9%. An awkward truth emerges: within the "platform commission + economies of scale" model, Trip.com has managed to achieve profits that are even "fatter" than many international giants.
And its scale is substantial. Trip.com's management stated directly during the Q4 2024 earnings call: the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of its core OTA business exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan. To put that into perspective? It's a reservoir large enough that even inserting a small, silent "pump" to skim off a tiny amount could yield a startling sum annually.
So, let's return to the core issue: where exactly has Trip.com gone wrong?
Many point the finger at "high prices." But high prices are not the original sin. Brand premium, service premium, even the convenience premium of "I just like booking everything on one platform" are acceptable. The problem is: the extra money it charges often has nothing to do with service, cost, or technological innovation. It more closely resembles a hidden tax – the more you trust it, the more you use it, and the more you dislike hassle, the more you are likely to pay.
This practice has a straightforward name in the Chinese internet: "big data price discrimination" or "dynamic pricing based on user data." Its logic isn't mystical; it's brutally simple: the system uses your purchase frequency, device information, order history, search dwell time, propensity for cancellations/changes, price-comparison behavior, coupon usage, etc., to build a profile of your "willingness to pay," then offers you a price you are statistically unlikely to refuse. You can't see others' prices, and it's difficult to recreate a simultaneous comparison, so it's like a very fine blade – you get cut and might just think your skin itched.
More critically, this isn't merely a "moral issue"; it potentially touches legal red lines. Article 24 of China's Personal Information Protection Law explicitly states: utilizing personal information for automated decision-making should ensure transparency, fairness, and justice, and must not impose unreasonable differential treatment on individuals regarding transaction conditions like price. In other words, if the core basis for differential pricing is "who you are," rather than "the product itself and market changes," it inherently operates in a high-risk zone.
You might ask: What about regulatory oversight? Recent signals are actually quite clear. Local regulatory authorities have already issued pointed reminders regarding risks associated with travel platforms, including "algorithmic intervention in pricing, price fraud, and abuse of market dominance." An administrative interview notice in Zhengzhou was even more direct: following investigation, it was confirmed that Trip.com had issues such as imposing unreasonable restrictions on transactions and transaction prices of merchants on its platform through service agreements, transaction rules, and technical means, and was required to rectify them. Translating this into plain language: it was indeed using rules and technology to "manipulate prices," and regulators deemed this problematic.
Looking higher up, public reports about "case filing/investigations" or "anti-monopoly investigations" have already emerged. I won't pre-judge any investigation here, but the point is this: when a platform is highly profitable, massive, nearly indispensable, and yet faces a continuous tide of complaints about "price opacity, rule opacity, algorithm opacity," you can no longer dismiss it as a minor flaw.
Why did these problems occur? The reasons aren't overly complex.
First, the market structure is highly concentrated. According to media-cited estimates, Trip.com's share of the hotel and travel GMV market is reported to be around 56%, with second-place Tongcheng at 15% and Meituan at 13%, etc. Putting these numbers together is like having only one supermarket on a street, with the rest being small convenience stores – it doesn't need to be fair to every customer; it just needs to make most people "too lazy to go elsewhere."
Second, user trust is being treated as a monetizable asset. The more you trust it won't cheat you, the more likely you are to be cheated silently. The Beijing Consumers Association conducted a survey on "big data price discrimination": 76.77% of respondents believed the phenomenon still exists, 64.33% reported having similar experiences; more starkly, nearly half of those affected chose to "accept their bad luck," with an extremely low proportion pursuing legal channels. This explains why platforms dare to do it: because they know取证难 (evidence is hard to obtain) and维权更难 (redress is even harder).
Third, it's a business with "low cost and high return." You don't need to invent new technology, upgrade services, or even raise prices to a level that causes outrage. You simply slice the price into countless thin segments, give different segments to different people, and hide the differentials behind information asymmetry.
Now, let's do a "very conservative, but sufficiently startling" calculation to answer the question you care about most: how much does it potentially earn from this?
Trip.com's management stated 2024 core OTA GMV exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan. Assume – note, this is an assumption – that within this 1.2 trillion, only 10% of orders are subject to the "who you are determines you pay a bit more" differential pricing; and the average extra charge per order is as low as 0.3% (9 yuan on a 3,000 yuan trip, which many wouldn't even notice). Then the additional "skimmed" amount would be approximately: 1.2 trillion × 10% × 0.3% = 360 million yuan. Adjusting the assumption slightly higher: if the affected portion is 20% and the幅度 (magnitude) is 0.5%, that becomes 1.2 billion yuan. See the terror of this model? It doesn't need to be "very harsh"; it just needs to be "very fine," so fine that everyone feels their individual loss is small, making no one willing to sue over a few dozen yuan.
Therefore, why is a "symbolic penalty" insufficient? Because it prices the risk of this business model down to a simple equation: if caught, just write a rectification plan, pay a token fine that doesn't hurt, and continue tomorrow.
To genuinely solve the problem, penalties must be commensurate with, or even exceed, the commercial benefits derived. My view is direct: if investigations ultimately confirm the existence of illegal activities such as using data and algorithms to implement unreasonable differential treatment, or using technical means to manipulate prices and restrict transactions, then the punishment cannot be merely "symbolic." At minimum, two things should happen: First, confiscate illegal gains (disgorge the profits). Second, impose punitive fines to completely block the "low-cost, high-return" path. China's Anti-Monopoly Law's framework for serious violations includes provisions for "confiscation of illegal gains + fines based on a percentage of the previous year's sales revenue." Simultaneously, mandatory algorithm audits and mandatory price transparency mechanisms are needed – for example, clearly providing a one-click option for "non-personalized prices" and maintaining verifiable records. Otherwise, if you catch one Trip.com today, a second and third will emerge tomorrow.
Finally, let me be more pointed: This isn't just a problem of "one platform"; it's a problem of "how technology is being used against ordinary people." We aren't afraid of platforms making money; we are afraid of platforms making money in ways you can't see – breaking fair transactions into fragments and hiding blades within those fragments.
Trip.com has earned so much money; it should understand this all the more: what's truly valuable isn't the algorithm, not the traffic, not even the market share, but that single second of trust when a user is willing to take out their credit card and entrust their itinerary to you. When trust is repeatedly harvested by algorithms, it eventually turns into an empty shell. By that time, no amount of symbolic penalties, whether three cups or three hundred cups, will be able to salvage it.
Comments