China Fines Trip.com Group RMB 5.179 Billion for Monopoly, Orders Refund of RMB 122 Million

In January this year, China's antitrust regulator launched an investigation into Trip. com Group. Recently, the company was fined RMB 5.179 billion, representing 7.5% of its revenue, for requiring certain hotels to enter exclusive partnerships and forcing some hotels to offer the lowest prices across all platforms. Trip. com Group accepted the penalty and introduced 19 remedial measures, including canceling exclusive partnerships, ending mandatory minimum pricing, removing all price adjustment tools, strengthening business personnel management, and refunding RMB 122 million in order deposits that had been forcibly withheld.

The Price Adjustment Assistant was a tool previously used by the platform to automatically track the lowest prices across all platforms. In March this year, Trip. com Group took the lead in removing this feature. Anna, who operates a hotel in Xinjiang, said that during the low season in late 2025, the Price Adjustment Assistant pushed room rates even lower, causing losses of over RMB 3,000 in half a month. An OTA operations staff member noted that business managers generally did not allow the Price Adjustment Assistant to be turned off, as doing so could put the platform at a price disadvantage and affect their performance.

In terms of platform traffic allocation, the Special Badge and Gold Badge affect the display order of hotels. The Special Badge requires exclusive partnerships with hotels, while the Gold Badge requires ensuring that Trip. com's price is the lowest by at least 5% and enabling automatic price tracking. Merchants need to participate in basic promotions, points alliances, and membership programs, or use promotional tools such as Cloud Ladder and Pyramid to gain traffic. Xiaoyang, who operates a homestay in Chongqing, reported that her property is in a prime location, well-decorated, and has a perfect rating, but because she did not pay for promotion, the platform's organic traffic generated very few orders. Last year, the platform delivered only 46 orders, of which 33% were from repeat customers, and 90% of new customers came from Xiaohongshu content. The platform associated her listing with a metro station that was far away, and her feedback did not lead to a correction. Regarding the review system, the platform had previously blocked reviews older than three years and excluded them from calculations, increasing the weight of recent reviews. One peer saw their overall rating drop from 4.9 to 4.3 due to a single 4.7 review, affecting their ranking and visibility.

Some business managers resorted to tactics such as pushing listings to the bottom of traffic, removing stores from the platform, maliciously enrolling stores in discount campaigns, limiting traffic, and forcibly adjusting prices to meet performance targets. com Group's customer service team intervened to coordinate when consumers encountered issues such as flight ticket refund errors, arriving at hotels with no rooms, or disputes with overseas hotels, and in some cases helped consumers resolve refund problems.