China requires online hotel booking platforms to maintain healthy market environment

BEIJING, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese online hotel booking platform companies are required to take primary responsibility for compliance, must prevent and defuse industry competition risks, and maintain a healthy and orderly tourism market environment.

Visitors gather at Trip.com's booth during a tourism expo in Shanghai on May 26. (File photo: China Daily)

This requirement was announced at a joint administrative guidance meeting for the online hotel booking platform service industry held by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Tuesday.

The meeting noted that fair competition is the cornerstone of the rule of law in the market economy, while compliant operation is the lifeline of enterprise development.

In recent years, China's online hotel booking platform service industry has developed rapidly, playing a positive role in making people's lives more convenient and boosting tourism consumption.

However, competition risks cannot be ignored. As key players in the industry, online hotel booking platform companies should stay within the bounds of the law, uphold fair competition, strengthen compliance management, and promote the healthy development of the industry.

The meeting required platform companies to comply with relevant laws and regulations, learn from cases, conduct self-examinations, and prevent and defuse the risks of "involution-style" competition.

Platform companies should enhance compliance awareness, improve long-term compliance mechanisms, and foster a market order featuring quality products, fair prices and healthy competition.

They should also safeguard consumers' lawful rights and interests and promote win-win outcomes across the platform ecosystem, the meeting said.

The meeting came amid intensifying regulatory scrutiny of the online travel sector.

In July, the State Administration for Market Regulation penalized Trip.com Group for abusing its market dominance, confiscating 1.658 billion yuan (about 245 million U.S. dollars) in illegal gains and imposing a 3.521-billion-yuan fine, equivalent to 7.5 percent of its sales in China in 2025. These two amounts total 5.179 billion yuan.

Separately, Trip.com, China's largest online travel platform, was ordered to refund roughly 122 million yuan in booking deposits withheld from hotels.

China's online accommodation market was valued at approximately 34 billion U.S. dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach nearly 65 billion dollars by 2031, according to a report by Mordor Intelligence, an industry analysis and consulting company.

By the end of 2025, the number of online travel booking users in China had reached 515 million, accounting for 45.8 percent of all internet users in the country.