A Record ¥5.18 Billion Fine Failed to Stop Ctrip's 'Price Assassin' Pricing

When regulators handed down China's largest-ever antitrust fine against an online platform — 5.179 billion yuan, roughly 720 million US dollars — Ctrip responded with a flurry of contrition, announcing 19 rectification measures across five areas. The fine, imposed July 25 by the State Administration for Market Regulation, punished the travel giant for forcing hotels into exclusivity and for compelling them to grant it "lowest price across the internet" clauses. Two months later, a new scandal suggests the deeper problem survived the record penalty.

A traveler surnamed Zhang from Zhengzhou paid 19,600 yuan for an eight-day custom-built tour of Hulunbuir, in Inner Mongolia. On the itinerary, one hotel in Manzhouli was priced at 1,520 yuan a night. At check-in she found something closer to a budget inn — and a price that astonished her. The same night's stay was listed at 1,456 yuan on Ctrip's regular booking channel, 589 yuan on rival apps, and just 500 yuan walking in off the street. Two of Ctrip's own "custom travel designers" had quoted the same hotel at 1,520 and 750 yuan. Over her two rooms, the gap reached nearly 2,000 yuan a night. "The traveler books it herself, it's 500 a night," Zhang told Henan TV's Dushi Baodao. "They earn 2,000 off me in one night."

When she asked for the difference back, Ctrip's reply became the story's second life. The platform said different supplier channels produce different prices, that it calculates any refund only against its own listed price that day, and offered coupons rather than cash. The involved travel agency called the gap a service fee — "a travel agency surely needs profit; it can't be that the hotel costs whatever it costs," a representative said.

The case went viral on September 11 under the hashtag "fined 5.179 billion, why does Ctrip keep price-discriminating" (罚了51.79亿携程为何还在杀熟). The verb in that hashtag — 杀熟, literally "killing the familiar" — is China's term for charging loyal or unsuspecting customers more, a practice regulators and state media have attacked for years, and one Shanghai's consumer council has urged Ctrip to cure as a "chronic disease." The topic entered Baidu's top-20 hot searches, with more than six million reads. In the country's landmark "big-data price-discrimination" lawsuit, a guest who booked through Ctrip in 2020 paid more than the hotel's own front-desk rate; a court in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, finally ruled in 2021 that Ctrip had committed price fraud and ordered it to refund triple the difference — 4,777 yuan.

Ctrip has offered no substantive response to Zhang beyond its channel-difference explanation, and the gap at the heart of the complaint is one the record fine never touched: regulators penalized the platform for how it treats hotels, not how it prices for travelers. That mismatch is exactly what commenters are pointing at now. "Fines never solve the real problem," one Weibo commentator wrote. "After the fine, to earn the money back, the platform may just double down on price discrimination." On the itinerary, meanwhile, the line that started it all still read, plainly: hotel fee, 1,520 yuan per night.