Economic Daily: Why Did Ctrip Receive the Heaviest Antitrust Penalty?

In July 2026, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) issued an administrative penalty decision against Trip.com Group (Ctrip) for abusing its dominant market position, ordering the company to cease its illegal conduct and fully refund order reserve funds, confiscating 1.658 billion yuan in illegal gains, and imposing a fine of 3.521 billion yuan — a fine ratio of 7.5 percent.

This is the highest fine ratio ever imposed in China's antitrust enforcement, exceeding the earlier penalties on Alibaba (4 percent) and Meituan (3 percent). Moreover, the confiscation of illegal gains is a form of punishment that did not appear in the Alibaba or Meituan cases.

Why did Ctrip receive the heaviest penalty? The answer lies in the covert nature of its conduct, the technical sophistication of its methods, and the systemic scope of the harm it caused.

I. Traffic Monopoly: A Soft Rope More Covert Than Forced "Pick One of Two"

Ctrip is currently China's largest online travel platform and holds a controlling stake in platforms such as Qunar. Since 2025, however, SAMR has received a concentration of complaints alleging monopolistic conduct by Ctrip: the platform forced hotel merchants to accept exclusive-cooperation "take-it-or-leave-it clauses" that barred their room inventory from being listed on other platforms, and used technical means to manipulate hotel prices. Merchants said they suffered heavy losses, hotel-industry profits declined sharply, fair market competition and merchants' interests were damaged, and "involution-style" competition in the industry intensified. Many consumers also noticed that some hotels could only be found on Ctrip. It was not that hotels lacked the capacity to operate on multiple platforms — they were tethered to Ctrip by an invisible rope.

Unlike the direct, forced "pick one of two" exclusivity demands of the Alibaba and Meituan era, Ctrip built a covert control system centered on traffic allocation.

Ctrip classified partner hotels into three tiers: Premier badge, Gold badge, and no badge. Premier-badge hotels enjoyed the greatest traffic boosts, benefit support, and other incentives — at the price of cooperating exclusively with Ctrip. Gold-badge hotels had to pledge the "lowest price across the entire network" — at least 20 yuan or 5 percent lower than on other platforms.

This "badge system" never put the exclusivity requirements into written contracts; they were conveyed orally by account managers. Once a hotel listed on another platform or its prices failed to meet the threshold, Ctrip punished it with downgrading and traffic throttling. One hotel reported that its Gold badge had been revoked three to five times since opening, and each demotion to no-badge status brought a traffic-penalty period of 15 days to one month.

Hotel operators generally want to operate across multiple platforms to gain more business opportunities, but Ctrip's absolute control over traffic allocation coerced merchants into abandoning cross-platform operations and squeezed out the survival space of competing platforms — constituting the restricted-dealing conduct prohibited under Item 4, Paragraph 1, Article 22 of the Anti-Monopoly Law.

The harm did not stop there. In the long run, locking premium hotel resources onto a single platform not only made it difficult for other platforms to compete effectively with Ctrip, but also significantly raised market-entry barriers and weakened the competitive constraints posed by potential entrants, creating a systemic threat to the healthy development of the entire online travel industry.

Yang Dong, dean of the Law School at Renmin University of China, said the case marks a key step in China's antitrust enforcement toward regulating platform traffic monopolies. Platform companies, relying on big data and artificial intelligence, intensively manipulate the transmission and allocation of traffic through various platform rules, making access to traffic the price merchants pay for accepting unfavorable trading terms. Such conduct has now been explicitly deemed illegal and will henceforth be subject to legal constraints.

II. Technology Turned Malicious: A 480-Yuan Room Rate Rewritten to 130 Yuan by the "Price Adjustment Assistant"

If the traffic monopoly was "soft control," then tools such as the "Price Adjustment Assistant" and "Badge Manager" were Ctrip's "hard levers" for stripping merchants of their pricing power.

The "Price Adjustment Assistant" is a feature Ctrip launched in recent years, billed as helping merchants "adjust prices intelligently and boost revenue." In actual operation, however, the tool acted only as a "price-cutting assistant": its back-end system automatically scanned prices on rival platforms and forcibly lowered hotel room rates without merchants' consent.

A hotel in Shaanxi Province reported that the Price Adjustment Assistant changed its prices more than ten times in a single day. According to Song Xiaoxi, vice president and secretary-general of the China Hospitality Association, a hotel merchant in Jiangsu complained that Ctrip forcibly activated the Price Adjustment Assistant nine times without authorization — "turning it off was useless; it would just switch back on" — and the hotel's 480-yuan-per-night holiday room rate was rewritten to 130 yuan. The merchant contacted Ctrip repeatedly to no avail: the account manager would not answer calls or reply on WeChat, and the hotel was ultimately docked points and fined by the platform for refusing orders.

Even worse was the disguised increase in commissions. One hotel reported that when the same room type sold for 100 yuan on Meituan and 98 yuan on Ctrip — short of Ctrip's required 5 percent discount (i.e., 95 yuan) — Ctrip simply deducted 3 yuan from the hotel through Badge Manager, cutting the hotel's revenue.

(This is a partial translation of the original article, covering approximately the first 2,000 characters. The remaining sections discuss expert views on consumer harm from the "lowest-price" clause, and why the record penalty signals regulatory resolve against traffic monopolies and "involution-style" competition.)