Recently, the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Regulation launched an investigation into four online travel platforms, Fliggy, Tongcheng, Tujia, and Meituan, for suspected illegal activities. As soon as the news came out, it attracted market attention. The four platforms responded quickly and stated that they would actively cooperate with regulatory investigations and fully implement regulatory requirements.
The first reaction of many people is that supervision has taken action again.
The investigation is to investigate behaviors that undermine fair competition and damage the rights and interests of merchants and consumers; what is needed is to protect the future of healthy, compliant, and sustainable development of the platform economy.
Supervision is not to "control" the platform, but to "stabilize" the industry.
It is worth noting that this investigation is based on the Anti-Unfair Competition Law of the People's Republic of China and the E-Commerce Law of the People's Republic of China, focusing on the platform's use of data and algorithms, technology, platform rules, etc. to implement unfair competition.
Supervision takes action at this time to calibrate the direction in time. It is not about suppressing platforms, but about returning competition to fairness, order, and benignity, and allowing platforms to use their capabilities for innovation and services within the rules.
For the online travel industry, this is a compliance lesson and an opportunity for transformation.
Some people believe that this regulatory direction is connected with the anti-monopoly treatment of Ctrip Group earlier this year in terms of governance goals, and together with the compliance governance of online ride-hailing and food delivery platforms, it forms the main line of recent platform economic governance.
This sends a clear signal that the platform economy is subject to normalized regulation, with no industry exceptions or scale exemptions. Technical means cannot become a "shield" for unfair competition.
For online travel platforms, the previous Ctrip case is a mirror. According to reports from relevant departments, Ctrip requires some hotels to carry out "choose one" exclusive cooperation, and demands "the lowest price in the entire network" for hotel merchants to kidnap the pricing power. In the short term, it will benefit the platform, but in the long term it will harm the ecology. Merchants lose their autonomy, consumers lose their right to choose, and the industry loses its power to innovate.
The purpose of supervision is not to make anyone fall, but to make all players understand: compliance is the bottom line, fairness is the premise, and development is the goal.
Only by establishing rules and drawing a clear bottom line can platform companies go further and the industry go better.
Previously, when the relevant person in charge of the Competition Policy Coordination Department of the State Administration for Market Regulation accepted an exclusive interview with Sanlihe, he gave three dimensions on "What to do about antitrust in 2026?", namely preventive supervision, strengthening law enforcement, and consolidating the responsibility of platform entities.
Gradient supervision gives enough space and draws clear red lines. This just shows that the original intention of supervision is to make the industry better, not to make companies confused.
In the past ten years, the competitive logic of online travel platforms has been that “traffic is king.” Whoever controls the traffic entrance has pricing power. Merchants are forced to accept high commissions, forced promotions, and low prices to attract traffic, and costs are passed on layer by layer.
But successive regulatory actions are changing all this.
The State Administration for Market Regulation has made it clear that it will focus on monopolistic behaviors that aggravate industry "involution", squeeze the development space of merchants on the platform, and harm the interests of consumers, promote the win-win development of platform companies, platform operators, and workers, and form a market environment with high quality, low prices, and healthy competition.
This means that platforms can no longer make excess profits by squeezing merchants. What they will compete for in the future is service, innovation, and quality.
It's a pain in the short term, but a bonus in the long term.
When good money drives out bad money and high quality and good prices become the mainstream, only then can the online travel industry truly move from "scale expansion" to "high-quality development."
｜Chief Planner: Yu Lan
｜Planner: Zhou Rui
｜Coordinator: Wang Qingkai Cheng Chunyu
｜Written by: Zhong Xingzhen
｜Editor: Zha Zhiyuan
｜Proofreading: Huang Lei
｜Produced by "Sanlihe" Studio
