Trip.com's company booth at a fair held in Shanghai, on May 26. [Photo/VCG]
China's antitrust action against leading online travel service provider Trip.com Group has moved scrutiny of the platform economy beyond explicit exclusivity agreements to the algorithms, traffic-allocation systems and contractual structures that can produce similar effects, experts said.
The State Administration for Market Regulation said on Saturday that it had confiscated 1.658 billion yuan ($245 million) in illegal gains from Trip.com, operator of the Ctrip travel platform, and imposed a 3.521 billion yuan fine, equivalent to 7.5 percent of its sales in China in 2025. The two amounts total 5.179 billion yuan. Separately, Trip.com was ordered to refund about 122.78 million yuan in booking deposits withheld from hotels.
The regulator described the action as China's first antitrust case in the online travel industry.
The investigation found that Trip.com had abused its dominance since 2020 by offering traffic and other benefits to "special-label" hotels on condition that they sell online room inventory exclusively through its platform. It also imposed an "all-network lowest-price" requirement on "gold-label" and unlabeled hotels, enforced through automated price adjustments, traffic restrictions, removal of merchant labels and deductions from booking deposits.
