Trip

Trip.com used exclusive deals and technical measures to limit competition and offer lowest prices, harming hotels' pricing freedom.

Trip.com is suspected of abusing its dominant market position, the State Administration for Market Regulation said in its statement, without elaborating on the allegations. The investigation is based on preliminary reviews and the anti-monopoly law, it said.

Trip.com, which runs Ctrip and Skyscanner among other brands, was said to be restricting market competition through means such as entering into exclusive partnerships with some hotels and offering prioritized traffic allocation to them, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said in a statement.

Trip.com, China's largest ​online travel platform, used traffic-allocation mechanisms, platform rules and technical measures to strike exclusive deals with some hotels as it sought to offer the lowest prices, the regulator said.

Chinese online travel services giant Trip.com has been ordered by a mainland court to make an exception in the application of its privacy policy after finding that the Shanghai-based company engaged in price discrimination, potentially opening the company to further legal action that could force it to change its policies for all users. The Keqiao District People’s Court in Shaoxing, a city in eastern Zhejiang province, last week ruled that Hong Kong-listed Trip.com must either allow for the plaintiff to use its services without agreeing to the platform’s privacy policy and service agreement or stop collecting unnecessary personal information. The ruling comes at a time when the Chinese government is building up a legal framework that restricts the country’s technology platforms from excessively collecting personal data from their users. The much-anticipated Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), the country’s first set of rules to safeguard personal data, was released in draft form last October and is still undergoing review. As part of the PIPL, companies will be restricted to collecting only the minimum amount of user data needed to provide services and will be barred from practices such as price discrimination. China tries to rein in Big Tech with new law on user data In the Shaoxing case, the plaintiff surnamed Hu, sued Trip.com after the company charged her 2,889 yuan (US$447) in July last year for a hotel room that should have only cost 1,377 yuan. In addition to the ruling on the company’s policies, the court also ordered Trip.com to pay 4,777 yuan in compensation for price fraud, false advertisement and deception. A spokeswoman for Trip.com said the company “reserves the legal right to appeal within the 15-day appeal period”, suggesting it may appeal to a higher court. In a recent high profile case, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing off the country’s app stores over serious violation of the country’s laws and regulation through the improper collection and usage of user information.

A court in eastern Zhejiang province’s Shaoxing ruled that Trip.com engaged in price discrimination