Online travel agency (OTA) and other platform companies have once again been summoned for regulatory discussions. According to a report from China Central Television on March 25, the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Regulation, together with the Municipal Commerce Bureau and the Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, lawfully conducted talks and administrative guidance with 12 platform enterprises, including Trip.com Group, Qunar.com, Amap, JD.com, Taobao Flash Sales, Fliggy, and Tongcheng Travel. The focus of this discussion was "involution-style" competition.
The report mentioned that this meeting centrally disclosed the first batch of issues identified since the comprehensive campaign to rectify "involution-style" competition on platforms began and put forward rectification requirements. Notably, among the 12 companies, Trip.com Group was listed first. Of the eight typical cases disclosed during the talks, three were directly related to Trip.com Group, and two involved its subsidiary Qunar.com, meaning five of the eight cases implicated the group.
The regulatory meeting highlighted three major operational violations by Trip.com Group: 1. Trip.com Group employed automatic price-matching, stripping hotels of their pricing autonomy. The platform used technical means to scrape real-time room rates across all channels and demanded the lowest prices be offered on its platform. If hotels did not comply, the platform exerted pressure via phone calls, restricted traffic, or automatically matched prices, directly interfering with pricing. This abuse of its dominant market position to force lowest prices, intervene in pricing, and limit traffic may have infringed upon merchants' operational autonomy. Regulators have since urged and guided Trip.com Group to remove its "Price Adjustment Assistant" tool. 2. Trip.com Group established unreasonable rules for identifying and penalizing "customer diversion." The platform defined "customer diversion" as situations where consumers placed orders on Trip.com but were guided by the hotel to complete the transaction outside the platform. Even if a consumer booked one night through Trip.com and extended their stay directly at the hotel front desk, it was considered diversion, which was deemed excessive. Regulators have instructed Trip.com Group to optimize its diversion rules, clarifying that behaviors like online booking followed by offline extension should not be classified as diversion. 3. Trip.com Group's "thumbs-up" icon misled consumers. Previously, the platform displayed orange or red "thumbs-up" icons next to the names of specially-certified or gold-level hotels it closely cooperated with. Regulators disclosed that these icons were completely unrelated to the hotels' actual service quality and were suspected of misleading consumers. Trip.com Group has been guided to remove the "thumbs-up" identifiers.
The subsidiary Qunar.com was also cited for two issues: 1. Third-party train ticket sales platforms engaged in false advertising. The platform promoted paid services like "Ticket Grabbing Acceleration Packs" and "Dual Channel" with misleading commercial claims such as "significantly improving success rates" and "priority purchasing." While Qunar.com was used as an example, this is a common industry-wide issue. Regulators stated plainly that platforms were "packaging the free waitlist booking service provided by 12306 as an exclusive platform value-added benefit." 2. Qunar.com's compliance operation mechanisms were inactive. Regulators noted that Qunar.com placed insufficient emphasis on compliance construction, had not established an actual compliance management organization, lacked systematic compliance management mechanisms, and conducted inadequate risk assessments for major promotional activities or important rule changes. This represents a severe compliance failure for a platform of its scale and user base.
Prior to this recent meeting, relevant authorities had summoned these platforms multiple times. Incomplete public records indicate that, including this instance, platforms like Trip.com Group have been subject to talks, reports, or investigations at least six times in the past year. These include a February meeting by financial, market, and central bank regulators concerning issues with financial institution partnerships for lending services, an August 2025 meeting in Guizhou province addressing potential problems like enforced exclusivity ("pick one") and price interference, a September 2025 administrative talk in Zhengzhou city confirming unreasonable restrictions on merchant transactions and pricing, and a November 2025 announcement by a Yunnan tourism association of collective action against alleged abuse of market dominance.
Recurring violations across these cases often involve the abuse of market dominance, enforcing "pick one" exclusivity, and disrupting normal merchant operations. While platforms are expected to leverage their traffic and technological advantages to help merchants improve efficiency, Trip.com Group has profited handsomely, whereas merchant outcomes are less clear. The group's financial performance is stark: in 2024, it reported revenue of RMB 53.3 billion and net profit attributable to shareholders exceeding RMB 17 billion. In 2025, revenue grew 17% to RMB 62.4 billion, with net profit nearly doubling to RMB 33.3 billion. In contrast, the combined revenue of 11 A-share listed hotel companies in 2024 was only RMB 30.7 billion, with net profit under RMB 1.8 billion, highlighting a significant disparity.
Despite repeated warnings and discussions, issues at Trip.com Group appear persistent. Consequently, the company now faces more than just notifications and talks. On January 14, China's State Administration for Market Regulation announced it had initiated a formal antitrust investigation into Trip.com Group Limited for suspected monopolistic practices involving the abuse of market dominance, based on preliminary reviews. Under China's Anti-Monopoly Law, violations can lead to confiscation of illegal gains and fines ranging from 1% to 10% of the previous year's sales revenue. Trip.com Group has stated it will cooperate fully with the investigation. The outcome of this probe is still pending.
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