The long Mid-Autumn and National Day break has come to a close.

Figures from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism show that during the National Day holiday, nationwide domestic trips and total domestic travel spending of 738.375 billion yuan rose 6.3% and 4.3% year on year respectively. Several online travel platforms disclosed holiday travel momentum from different angles: Ctrip said domestic ticket orders achieved double-digit growth year on year, Tongcheng said overnight visitors to traditional long-haul destinations rose by more than 20%, and Fliggy said bookings for nature scenery and village-style travel products grew by more than 40%. The three sets of figures use different criteria, but all indicate that peak-season travel remains brisk.

Beyond the bustle of peak season, a longer-term question is surfacing: lodging, the "compass" of the hotel and travel industry, is facing multiple overlapping pressures. Both the macroeconomy and lodging itself sit in the "late winter, early spring" of a Kondratiev cycle, and for nearly three years the growth rate of lodging supply has kept outpacing demand, with the scissors gap still widening.

At present, Fliggy is the only OTA to disclose overall hotel market conditions. Its data show that fulfilled room nights during the long holiday exceeded historical peaks for four consecutive days, average daily room nights rose nearly 70% year on year, more than 100 cities saw hotel room nights double, and more than 70 brand hotel official flagship stores on the platform doubled their room nights. This means that, against low single-digit growth for the entire lodging market, Fliggy is rapidly capturing more market share. One merchant said orders from Fliggy have recently accounted for nearly 50% of its total, compared with about 20% for a long period before.

Half seawater, half flame. This shows that lodging is growing, but the logic of that growth may already have changed.

Broad Gains Ebb as Supply Growth Reshapes Competition

The China Hospitality Association's "China Hotel Industry Development Report" over the past three years shows that, as of December 31, 2025, mainland hotel industry facilities had reached 375,000, with a total of 18.736 million rooms. From 2022 to 2025, the compound annual growth rate of hotel stores and rooms exceeded 10%, with supply maintaining double-digit growth.

But the other side of the coin is that hotel revenue has not advanced in step. The 2026 interim reports confirm this trend — the overall RevPAR of several listed hotel groups still edged up on the back of new stores, but mature stores operating for more than 18 months saw RevPAR fall between 2% and 6% year on year. The pressure of stock-market competition has already been transmitted to the operating data of mature stores.

To compete for limited guests, many hotels have been forced into price wars: cutting prices to attract traffic, compressing costs, and even sacrificing RevPAR to protect OCC. The result is pressure on both RevPAR and OCC, and the room for service quality upgrades is squeezed as well. This is not the problem of any single hotel, but a collective dilemma for the entire industry under supply-demand imbalance. When "cutting prices" becomes the most effective competitive tool, the industry's ability to create value is being consumed bit by bit.

For hotel operators, only two directions lie ahead: one is to cut operating costs and tighten belts, and the other is to seek incremental space and increase revenue. The former is nearly impossible, as rigid costs such as labor and linen have actually been rising year by year over the past two years. Therefore, finding growth within the stock market is the core proposition for operators.

From Broad Traffic to Competition for High-Quality Customer Groups

Opportunities never disappear; they only shift. Over the past year, the traffic structure of online travel platforms has seen some changes. Last June, Fliggy joined Alibaba's China e-commerce business group, and Fliggy quickly gathered resources within Taobao and Amap, including adding a first-level traffic entrance in the Taobao app, listing discounted hotels on Taobao Flash Sale, and connecting membership systems with Taobao. Under the strategic pull of Alibaba's broad consumption platform, the more than 400 million DAU gathered by high-frequency transactions became the thickest traffic inlet for Fliggy's hotel and travel orders.

The result of this synergy is first reflected in Fliggy's own growth data. Fliggy disclosed that during the 2025 Mid-Autumn and National Day holiday, the 2026 Spring Festival and the 2026 summer vacation, its hotel room nights rose 78%, 75% and 66% year on year respectively; during this long holiday, average daily hotel room nights rose nearly 70% year on year and exceeded the platform's historical peak for four consecutive days. These figures are based on a single platform's criteria, cannot directly represent the overall trend of the lodging industry, and are not enough on their own to infer market share changes, but they provide an opening to observe structural incremental growth: platforms and merchants able to connect to new scenarios and specific groups still have opportunities to gain new order sources in stock-market competition.

Among them, high-value members have become a variable worth watching. Fliggy data show that during this National Day long holiday, 88VIP users' per-capita hotel spending on Fliggy was 34% higher than the market average, driving fulfilled room nights for Fliggy's high-star hotel market up more than 80% year on year. Clearly, beyond traffic, 88VIP users have become the most prominent engine in this round of growth. According to industry insiders close to Fliggy, over the past year Fliggy significantly increased resource investment in 88VIP and Fliggy F4 and above high-value groups. For example, with the help of Taobao's Super 88 and other activities, it reached more than 60 million 88VIP users through coupons and other means; for typical user pain points such as flight refunds and changes and hotel price cuts, it provided additional fallback guarantees to these users; and during the 618 and Double 11 promotions it even launched exclusive premium products, conducting refined operations directly at the product level.

For hotels, the value of such customer groups lies not only in higher spending per customer, but also in their stronger demand for room types, services and brand experiences. The revenue from one high-grade room type may exceed that from several basic room types sold at low prices. From this perspective, the focus of platform competition is shifting from "who can bring more visits" to "who can more accurately identify and organize effective demand."

Brand flagship stores provide another path. Hotel groups can accumulate members within the platform, present brand supply in a unified way, and form more stable repeat-purchase relationships through packages, benefits and service differences. It may not replace a hotel's own membership system, but it has become an important means for brand hotels to acquire new customers and connect platform public-domain traffic with brand private-domain operations. Some industry insiders analyze that this is also the killer move that has rapidly attracted lodging industry suppliers to join Fliggy over the past year — for hotels, rather than probing downward for price cuts and mutual slaughter, it is better to look upward for precise customer groups and then operate them continuously.

New Channels Bring New Growth and New Costs

Beyond OTA platforms, the booming hotel and travel business of content platforms represented by Douyin and Xiaohongshu also cannot be ignored. Douyin data show that among group-buying orders during this year's Mid-Autumn and National Day long holiday, hotel and guesthouse orders rose nearly 79% year on year. For hotel operators, content platforms not only have huge traffic pools of their own, but merchants also have the chance to actively create traffic through short videos, livestreams and other content methods, converting "emotional value" into "transactional value."

But content channels are not without cost. Continuous production of short videos, livestream advertising and influencer cooperation all require money; when traffic competition intensifies, merchants may again fall into low-price group buying. More importantly, hotel transactions do not end with a single content seeding effort, as subsequent steps also involve room status, price, inventory, fulfillment and after-sales service. Whether stable conversion and fulfillment capabilities can be built determines whether content heat can settle into long-term returns.

Therefore, for hotels, the meaning of new channels is not "opening one more account," but building a channel combination: traditional online travel platforms handle clear demand, content platforms stimulate potential demand, and brand membership systems are responsible for accumulating relationships. How to allocate budgets, products and inventory among different channels will become part of hotel merchants' revenue management trade-offs.

AI Is Becoming a New Variable

In the long run, AI's imaginative space also cannot be ignored. Counting from the online shift in the 1990s, the digitalization of the lodging industry has seen basically no major changes in nearly 30 years, and the tags for a hotel or a room are often only a few dozen. But the demand side has long been different: a family trip must consider transfers, hotel distance within a few kilometers of a certain place, a room where one can watch the sunset, customized service that can satisfy both meetings and casual meals at the same time... These complex and highly segmented needs are difficult to satisfy through traditional shelf-style search, but AI can.

This is a new opportunity for all AI participants. Data disclosed by platforms already show some early changes. Fliggy data show that during the long holiday, flight and hotel bookings guided by Fliggy Assistant surged 110% month on month, and the number of completed check-ins, refunds and changes and other matters rose nearly 100%; Doubao data also show that "Doubao hotel booking" orders rose 56% month on month. These numbers are still at an early business stage and are affected by base effects and holiday effects, so they are not yet enough to show that AI has reshaped the booking landscape, but they at least indicate that AI Agents are trying to enter the hotel and travel transaction chain.

For hotels, the first challenge brought by AI is reorganizing supply information. In the past, a hotel might only need to maintain address, star rating, room type and price; in the future, details such as transfer capability, pet policy, accessibility facilities, scenic orientation and child-friendly services may all affect whether it can be accurately found in a natural-language Q&A. The supply side is indeed responding. According to previous reports, Fliggy joined hands with Qwen and nearly 100 major hotel and travel brands on AI cooperation, providing exclusive subsidies for AI-channel users of Fliggy and Qwen, including well-known brand hotel groups such as Wanda, Jin Jiang, Huazhu, BTG Homeinns, Hyatt, Dossen, Shangmei Digital Intelligence and GreenTree.

The second challenge occurs on the operating side. AI can be used for repetitive work such as room status and inventory adjustment, invoice processing and real-time data analysis. Test data from merchant tools previously disclosed by Fliggy show that some hotels shortened the decision-making time for price and inventory management from an average of 2 hours to 10 minutes. It hints at a possibility: AI's short-term value to the hotel industry may first be not replacing people, but shortening the operating decision-making chain.

These two challenges, more plainly put, mean that whoever first reorganizes or even creates supply for the AI era is more likely to make it easier for users to find and accurately find them under the AI booking entrance and gain first-mover advantage; whoever is good at using AI tools is more likely to widen the gap in operating efficiency and taste the benefits first.

Competition is cruel. If someone erodes share, someone else loses share. The lodging industry's growth over a long period benefited from rising online penetration, chain penetration and expanding tourism consumption. As these dividends gradually return to normal, growth is no longer simply the natural result of a rising market, but a capability that must be actively built.

In the short to medium term, anchor to those certain sources of incremental growth. Taking Fliggy as an example, high-quality customer groups represented by 88VIP, private-domain members represented by brand flagship stores, and cross-scenario traffic brought by Alibaba ecosystem synergy — these are certain directions that can be converted into room nights and revenue in the next peak season. In the long term, prepare for the supply and operating models of the AI era. When consumers express demand from "filter conditions" to "natural language descriptions," when search shifts from "shelf-style" to "conversational," and when operating decisions move from "experience-based" to "data switches," hotels' supply information and operating methods will all need a new round of adaptation.

Of course, this is not something a platform can complete unilaterally; it requires joint investment from merchants and platforms. For decades, China's hotel and travel system has been catching up with developed countries in online penetration and chain penetration. When the broader market no longer provides broad gains, growth becomes a capability that must be actively built. And that capability is defining the competitive landscape of the lodging industry's next cycle.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE: BABA) and Alibaba-W (HKEX: 09988) stand at the center of this ecosystem push, as Fliggy's integration into Alibaba's broader consumption platform shapes how traffic, membership and AI tools flow into the lodging sector.