Reporter Ren Chong
During the National Day holiday that just passed, the market was very enthusiastic about traveling, and the prices of air tickets and hotels were also rising. Some consumers have discovered that some accounts on social platforms, including official accounts of some scenic spots and hotels, are promoting some attractively priced "hotel accommodation + scenic spot tickets" packages. Are these packages really cost-effective?
There is a mystery behind the word "qi" in the advertisement
"The social platform pushed an advertisement to me, to the effect of 'Don't worry about a National Day trip for parents and children, all-inclusive accommodation for the whole family only starts at 670 yuan.' I checked the main body of the advertisement and it was the official account of a well-known scenic spot. But when I checked the listings, I found that the actual booking price was very different from the advertised price." Ms. Yan, a consumer, shared her own experience.
The advertisement comes from a scenic spot that contains several hotels and several parent-child parks. According to Ms. Yan’s understanding, the so-called “all-inclusive” means including hotel accommodation and park tickets, with the lowest price being 670 yuan per night. When she opened the booking applet associated with the advertisement, she could not find a room type priced at 670 yuan. After careful search, I found that the lowest room rate during the National Day holiday is 798 yuan per night, which does not include breakfast and park tickets. For the same room type, if you add two adult tickets to the park, the price will rise to 962 yuan; if you want to go to two parks, the room price will soar to 1,968 yuan.
The reporter contacted the customer service of the scenic spot and was told that the scenic spot had marked "starting at 670 yuan" when promoting it. "670 yuan" refers to the net room rate on a specific date, "excluding breakfast and park tickets, which are currently sold out." The house prices and ticket prices during the festival will be charged as stated online.
"It is common for hotel prices to follow the market, especially for popular parent-child parks and parent-child hotels. Special rooms are rarely available during holidays. Scenic spots use the word 'qi' to highlight low room prices, not only to attract consumers, but also to exclude their own legal liability." explained Mr. Jun, a travel industry practitioner.
He revealed that for special rooms that appear during holidays, consumers should also pay attention to the pricing unit, because some businesses will secretly replace consumers’ default “total price per room per night” with “single person per night”, creating the illusion of low prices by splitting the pricing. Consumers usually think that "XX yuan/night" means the price of a room for one night, which can accommodate two people, or children or teenagers can stay for free. However, in order to promote low housing prices, some businesses will spread the room charges evenly to the number of guests. For example, a double room with an original price of 560 yuan is marked as "280 yuan per night" in marketing, and only "calculated as 2 people staying for one night" is marked in the room type details.
"Five Diamonds" does not equal "Five Stars"
Another trick is that merchants confuse "star-rated hotels" as stated in the national standard "Classification and Rating of Star Ratings for Tourist Hotels" with "diamond-rated hotels" determined by the platform themselves, and use expressions such as "five-diamond hotels" and "four-diamond hotels" to mislead consumers.
This summer, consumer Ms. Xia took her children and elderly people on a trip, and chose a "luxury" route on a certain platform, claiming to "stay at a five-diamond hotel for the entire trip." But during her actual trip, she discovered that many hotels had no star rating at all.
The reporter's investigation found that "mixed star- and diamond-level accommodations" are very common in the tourism industry. Not only are "star-level" and "diamond-level" marked on the booking platform, but also "star-level accommodation" and "diamond-level accommodation" appear simultaneously in many travel agencies' itinerary introductions.
But in fact, star hotels approved in accordance with national standards and diamond hotels promoted by the platform are two completely independent and mutually exclusive rating systems. Among them, star-rated hotels are evaluated by the National Tourism Star-Rated Hotel Rating Committee, and the hotels voluntarily apply for on-site verification in accordance with national standards. The travel service booking platform (OTA platform) and what travel agencies call "diamond" hotels come from the business reference system independently built by the platform. There is no unified standard in the industry, and there is no official verification or supervision system. The platform mainly provides dynamic scoring and rating based on algorithms such as hotel decoration grade, user ratings, business popularity, order sales, etc., and does not represent official quality certification.
The market supervision department has long made it clear that merchants' behavior of using the platform's diamond-level label to benchmark star-rated services and mislead premium sales constitutes false propaganda. For consumers, when booking a hotel or choosing travel services, they should pay attention to whether it is a "star" or "diamond".
