Trip.com fined RMB5.179 billion for market abuse; exclusive deals and lowest-price guarantees banned

On July 25, 2026, the State Administration for Market Regulation released an administrative penalty decision finding that Trip. com had abused its dominant market position. The company was fined a total of RMB5.179 billion, comprising confiscation of illegal gains of RMB1.658 billion, a fine of RMB3.522 billion, and an order to refund RMB123 million in order reserves to hotels. The penalty targeted two practices: signing exclusive cooperation agreements with some hotels that restricted them from listing on other platforms, and requiring hotels to offer the “lowest online price. ” The decision noted that Trip. com used technical tools such as “Rate Adjustment Assistant,” “Listing Pass,” and “AI Business Assistant” to automatically lower hotel listing prices, and punished non-compliance with stepped traffic restrictions, removal of listing traffic priority, and ultimately forced delisting.

In a same-morning response, Trip. com said it “sincerely accepts and resolutely obeys” the decision. CEO Sun Jie later issued an internal letter stating that the penalty is an important opportunity to sort out the company’s business model and recalibrate its industry positioning. She said the core logic of the rectification is to lead the industry in eliminating disorderly involution, building a fair and transparent market environment, and expanding the incremental market. Sun emphasized that the company’s overall operations remain stable and are not affected by the penalty, and she set out guidelines for employees when dealing with family, merchants and public opinion.

Europe’s antitrust experiments with similar parity clauses over the past five years offer comparable results. In 2022, the EU revised its Vertical Block Exemption Regulation to exclude wide parity clauses from automatic exemption. In September 2024, the EU Court of Justice ruled that Booking. com’s parity clauses did not constitute necessary ancillary restraints. In July 2024, Spain’s National Commission on Markets and Competition fined Booking. com €413.24 million. A paper published in the International Journal of Industrial Organization used a synthetic control method to estimate that banning the widest parity clauses caused hotel room prices to fall by about 1.5% and occupancy to rise by about 1 percentage point. Further banning narrow parity clauses resulted in an additional price decline of between 0% and 4%, with no significant change in occupancy.

In December 2022, the market regulator found that CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) had engaged in unfairly high pricing and exclusive dealing, fining it RMB87.6 million and ordering it to lift exclusive cooperation and lower prices. CNKI announced 15 rectification measures the same day. Four years later, university procurement notices show that institutions such as Wenzhou University, Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Fudan University, Henan University of Science and Technology, and Nankai University continue to order CNKI databases through sole-source procurement, citing justifications such as “sole supplier,” “unique distribution channel,” and “irreplaceable.

The penalty decision disclosed that from 2020 to 2025, Trip. com’s share of transaction value in China’s online hotel booking platform service market was stable between 53% and 59%. The market’s Herfindahl-Hirschman Index remained between 4,100 and 4,600 for an extended period, and the combined market share of the top three enterprises reached 94% to 95%. Hotel operators had virtually no bargaining power over commission rates and other service fees. The decision also determined that hotels’ self-operated online booking services and third-party online hotel booking platform services do not belong to the same relevant product market, on the grounds that self-operated channels cover a limited number of hotels and consumers and mainly rely on their own traffic and channels.

Detailed traffic allocation mechanisms were also disclosed. Hotels were classified as special-brand, gold, or unbranded, and the brand type was directly written into the search ranking priority weight, creating a traffic allocation hierarchy in which special-brand ranked above gold, and gold above unbranded. Gold hotels were required to offer a price advantage of at least RMB20 or 5% of the selling price relative to competing platforms; failure to meet this triggered automatic price adjustments by the system. More than 90% of special-brand hotels had long-term, stably executed exclusive cooperation. The penalty prohibits restricting or de facto restricting hotels from operating on other platforms, prohibits demanding the lowest online price, and orders refund of reserves, but does not address the product design of using brand type as a ranking weight.