With the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays approaching, online hotel reservations are entering a peak consumption period. On September 21, the Anhui Provincial Market Supervision Administration, together with the Provincial Development and Reform Commission, the Provincial Department of Commerce, and the Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, held an administrative guidance session on the operational conduct of online hotel booking platforms. The session required these platforms to strictly fulfill their primary responsibilities for compliant business management, and to effectively safeguard pricing order and consumer rights within the sector. Representatives from major platforms such as Meituan, Douyin, Ctrip, Tongcheng, and Fliggy attended the meeting.

The administrative guidance focused on standardizing platform pricing practices. It required platforms to guarantee hotels their independent pricing rights and their autonomy to operate across different platforms. Furthermore, platforms were urged to strengthen their management over both the platform itself and the businesses operating on it, actively and properly resolving consumer disputes, and putting an end to practices that harm consumer interests, such as price fraud, big-data-driven price discrimination against regular users, and forced price adjustments.

Additionally, the meeting placed special emphasis on prohibiting platforms from using data, algorithms, traffic, or rules to drive significant price increases for hotels. It also banned practices like attracting customers with low prices only to settle at higher rates, and engaging in fictitious discounts or price hikes.

Since the beginning of this year, Anhui Province has continuously strengthened its oversight of online hotel booking platforms. On August 31, the province issued a notice on regulating room rates in the accommodation industry during key periods. This notice specifies concrete regulatory requirements in four main areas: enhancing the compliance management of platform pricing conduct, safeguarding the independent pricing rights of businesses on the platforms, regulating platform fee structures, and standardizing platform transaction behaviors.

Looking ahead, the Anhui provincial market regulatory authorities will continue to collaborate with relevant departments to intensify supervision of the accommodation industry. They will strictly and swiftly punish illegal activities such as price fraud and price gouging, and will publicly expose typical cases.