China's market regulator slaps fine on Trip.com platform

China's market regulator has fined online travel platform Trip.com Group 5.18 billion yuan ($720 million) for abusing its dominant position in the country's online hotel booking market through exclusive dealing arrangements and price restrictions imposed on hotels.

The State Administration for Market Regulation said on Saturday it had ordered Trip.com to cease the illegal practices, return 122 million yuan in hotel order security deposits that had been forcibly deducted, confiscated 1.66 billion yuan in illegal gains and imposed a fine of 3.52 billion yuan, equivalent to 7.5 percent of the company's 2025 domestic sales revenue of 46.96 billion yuan.

SAMR said it launched an antitrust investigation into Trip.com in January under China's anti-monopoly law. Regulators conducted on-site inspections, collected extensive evidence, investigated competing platforms and numerous hotels, analyzed data and algorithms, consulted experts and repeatedly heard the company's arguments before reaching a decision.

The regulator found that since 2020, Trip.com had abused its dominant position in China's online hotel booking platform market through two types of monopolistic conduct.

First, it required selected "special-tier" hotel partners to enter exclusive cooperation agreements by offering incentives such as greater traffic exposure and platform benefits, while prohibiting them from cooperating with rival booking platforms.

Second, it required "gold-tier" and other hotels to provide the lowest prices available across all online platforms. According to the regulator, Trip.com required hotels operating on multiple platforms to ensure prices on its platform were the lowest on the internet. If lower prices were found elsewhere, the company used automated pricing tools and manual intervention to reduce prices on its own platform.

SAMR said Trip.com also used technical means to monitor compliance with both the exclusivity arrangements and the lowest-price requirements, enforcing them through measures including reducing traffic, removing hotels from preferred listings and deducting order security deposits.

The regulator said the practices excluded and restricted market competition, limited hotels' ability to operate across multiple platforms, infringed upon hotels' pricing autonomy, harmed consumer interests, intensified excessive competition within the industry and hindered the sector's healthy development.