The second half of the OTA sector kicks off with a 5.179 billion-yuan fine.

Following Alibaba and Meituan, anti-monopoly law enforcement on the platform economy has further extended to the cultural and tourism industry.

On July 25, the State Administration for Market Regulation announced an administrative penalty against Trip.com for its monopolistic practices of abusing market dominance: confiscating illegal gains of 16.58 billion yuan, imposing a fine of 35.21 billion yuan, with the total of fines and confiscations reaching 51.79 billion yuan, and ordering it to fully refund 1.22 billion yuan in mandatory order reserves deducted from hoteliers.

This marks the first anti-monopoly case in China's online travel industry, and also the first time illegal gains have been confiscated in a major monopolistic case involving an internet platform.

In the same month the penalty was implemented, the "15th Five-Year Plan" for the Construction of a Leading Tourism Nation was issued. The plan positions the tourism industry as an "emerging strategic pillar industry" and a "people's livelihood industry and happiness industry with distinct characteristics of the times", while setting higher requirements for leading platforms and key enterprises: they must not only play a leading and driving role to empower the industry, but also eliminate hidden barriers that hinder a unified market and fair competition.

On one hand, the strategic status of the tourism industry has been elevated, and on the other, the boundaries of platform competition are being redrawn. The convergence of these two events within the same time window sends a clear signal: cultural and tourism platforms are entrusted with more important industrial responsibilities, and will also be subject to stricter regulatory constraints.

For the OTA industry that has undergone more than two decades of rapid expansion, this is not just a fine, but also a phased turning point. When connecting supply and demand has become a fundamental capability, the question the platform needs to answer is: what will drive value creation in the next step?

01. 20 Years of OTA: From Connecting Supply and Demand to Infrastructure

The facts identified in this penalty mainly focus on two aspects: one is restrictive trading, and the other is intervention in pricing. More specifically, this penalty clarifies a set of basic rules:

Platforms can attract hotels to cooperate by relying on products, services and efficiency, but cannot use their market position to force operators to abandon other sales channels; they can provide pricing tools and market suggestions, but cannot force merchants to accept the so-called "lowest price across the network" through means such as traffic restriction, demotion, and fund deduction.

In other words, hotels have the right to decide who to cooperate with, and should also retain the final pricing power.

To understand this set of rules, we need to go back to the original problems that OTA was designed to solve.

Trip.com, founded in 1999, was one of the first batches of online travel platforms in China. At that time, the tourism market was highly fragmented, hotel prices were opaque, real-time room status was difficult to check, and reservations mainly relied on telephone calls, travel agencies and offline agents. Consumers not only found it difficult to compare prices, locations and room types, but also had to bear high information search costs and transaction risks.

The emergence of OTA changed this situation. The platform aggregates hotels, air tickets and travel products scattered across different regions into a single interface, allowing consumers to search, compare, book and review, thus significantly reducing the costs of information screening and transaction decision-making.

This model is equally important for the supply side.

An individual hotel or homestay can hardly independently build a sales network covering the whole country and even the world, nor can it afford the long-term costs of search promotion, member operation, payment settlement and customer service. Accessing an OTA is equivalent to exchanging commissions for a ready-made channel infrastructure. Operators only need to connect their housing resources to the platform to gain access to consumers that were previously unreachable.

This is also the common foundation for the rise of global OTAs. Whether it is Trip.com, Booking or Expedia, the initial value they create is to connect highly fragmented supply and demand, reducing transaction costs for both parties.

The discourse power of the platform has gradually taken shape in this process.

When OTA evolves from an additional sales channel to the main transaction entry point, what the platform carries is no longer just information. Ranking determines whether a hotel can be seen, traffic affects how orders are distributed, and the review system shapes consumer trust. How to define the boundaries here is precisely the significance of this case. Regulation does not negate the industrial value of OTA, but redefines its scope of power after the platform has developed strong organizational capabilities.

02. The More Important the Platform, the Clearer the Rights and Responsibilities

Over the past two decades, what OTAs have solved is how to organize scattered tourism supplies. Entering a new stage, the question becomes: when the platform already has strong organizational capabilities, how should this capability be used?

The answer is obviously not to force the platform to retreat to a pure "information intermediary".

The scale of China's hotel industry has expanded rapidly, but the pattern of scattered supply has not fundamentally changed. In 2025, the chain rate of China's hotel industry was 41.8%, which, although increasing year by year, is still significantly lower than the level of over 70% in developed countries. The gap between cities at different levels is also very significant: the chain rate in first-tier cities reached 59.7%, while that in other cities was only 35.3%. The deeper you go into the sinking markets, the higher the proportion of individual hotels, homestays and small operators.

This supply structure not only forms the foundation for the long-term existence of OTAs, but also determines that platforms cannot only undertake simple display and matchmaking functions.

For a large number of small and medium-sized operators, OTA is first and foremost a channel infrastructure. They use the platform to reach customers across the country and even overseas, and access payment, marketing, member operation and customer service systems at relatively low costs, thus gaining the opportunity to compete with large chain hotels.

In a market lacking unified brand and service standards, platforms also undertake part of the credit building function. When consumers book an unfamiliar individual hotel, they often rely not on the hotel's own brand, but on the ratings, reviews, refund mechanism and after-sales guarantee on the platform. Over time, the review system, credit rules and service specifications of the platform have become important quality benchmarks and trust infrastructure for the industry.

But the flip side of the coin is that when traffic, data, credit and transaction rules are concentrated in a single entity, the bargaining power between the platform and operators is inherently unequal.

This is not a problem unique to OTAs. Almost all infrastructure-type platforms will face the same proposition when they develop to a certain stage: platforms need to maintain market order, but cannot expand their control over operators in the name of governance. This is true for e-commerce and local life services, and it is also true for online travel.

Therefore, what this regulation aims to clarify is not just several specific business rules, but a set of stable, clear and predictable rights and responsibilities relationships. The platform will continue to connect supply and demand, build credit, and maintain transaction order, while operators retain basic autonomy in areas such as channel selection and pricing decision-making.

Viewed in the policy context of the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, this fine is not an isolated event. As the scale of the tourism industry expands and the degree of onlineization increases, OTA has gradually evolved from an innovative channel to an important infrastructure that affects the allocation of industry resources.

According to the goals set in the "15th Five-Year Plan" for the Construction of a Leading Tourism Nation, by 2030, the number of domestic tourist trips will reach 8.3 billion, and the total domestic tourism expenditure will reach 7.7 trillion yuan; the number of inbound tourists will reach 190 million, and international tourism revenue will exceed 150 billion US dollars.

The continued expansion of the market means that more consumers and operators will be connected through platforms, and the influence of OTAs on traffic allocation, price discovery and supply organization will further deepen. The focus of industry governance has accordingly shifted from the early stage of encouraging digitalization and improving transaction efficiency, to building a large tourism market with fair competition, clear rights and responsibilities, and full autonomy for business entities.

Therefore, what this penalty calibrates is precisely the boundary between the industrial value of the platform and the independent space of operators.

03. Moving to the Industrial Periphery to Find New Value Anchors

The regulatory rejection of "choosing one's own exclusive platform" and mandatory lowest prices has blocked an old-style competition path: platforms consolidate their user scale and market share by locking in supplies, controlling prices and concentrating traffic. The "15th Five-Year Plan" for the Construction of a Leading Tourism Nation puts forward another requirement — platforms must "empower the industry". This means that OTAs cannot just be responsible for distributing orders to operators, but also help the industry improve product development, operation management and service capabilities.

On the afternoon of July 25, Trip.com released a rectification announcement, proposing 19 measures in five aspects. For the penalized platform, stopping illegal acts, refunding relevant funds, and canceling unreasonable restrictions are compliance rectifications that must be completed. But the real transformation depends on what the platform will rely on to generate revenue and build competitiveness in the future.

The e-commerce industry provides a reference. What China's e-commerce platforms initially solved were also problems of information and transaction matchmaking: enabling consumers to find products and merchants to find buyers. As penetration increases, connecting supply and demand itself is no longer a scarce capability. Leading platforms have begun to enter deeper industrial links, extending from providing stores and traffic to demand forecasting, product design, supply chain management, brand building and cross-border sales.

Now, OTAs have also reached a similar crossroads.

China has a huge amount of tourism supply, but a large number of individual hotels, homestays, scenic spots and small travel service providers still lack capabilities in brand building, digital operation and product development. Some operators have regional characteristics, but do not know how to display and package their products; some have mastered local resources, but find it difficult to design room types, routes and services according to changes in customer groups; many merchants have long relied on price cuts to obtain orders, lacking revenue management and refined operation capabilities.

These problems cannot be solved by simply increasing traffic. Traffic can bring an order, but it may not help operators build sustainable business capabilities.

The growth of inbound tourism has further exposed these shortcomings. Multilingual content, international payment, cross-border marketing, overseas customer service, and compliance requirements in different markets all require long-term investment. Most small and medium-sized operators can hardly build these capabilities independently, but platforms can provide them in the form of public tools and basic services.

Trip.com disclosed that in the first quarter of 2026, its inbound tourism bookings increased by about 90% year-on-year. But whether inbound tourism truly constitutes "industrial empowerment" should not only be measured by how many additional orders the platform generates, but also by whether operators can gain sustainable capabilities from it. For example, whether they can complete multilingual content construction at low cost, access more convenient payment and customer service systems, obtain real overseas demand data, and adjust products and services accordingly.

The same is true for the domestic market.

Consumers are shifting from standardized large-group tours to small-group, customized and themed experiences, with more diversified demands that place greater emphasis on content and services. Platforms can use demand data to help destinations develop products, provide digital tools for small service providers, and recombine accommodation, transportation, catering, performances and local experiences to create consumption scenarios that did not exist before.

This is more difficult and slower than asking hotels to cut prices by dozens of yuan. It requires platforms to shift their data capabilities, which were previously mainly used for traffic allocation and price monitoring, to demand discovery, product innovation and operational efficiency improvement; and transform their management methods that previously emphasized unified rules and merchant compliance, to providing tools and services that can be independently selected.

Accordingly, the criteria for measuring OTAs also need to change.

In the past, the scale of a platform was mainly reflected by transaction volume, number of users and room nights. In the future, the industrial value of a platform should also depend on how much new demand it creates, how much real transaction costs it reduces, and how many operators it helps build sustainable business capabilities.

This does not mean that platforms have to abandon their commercial interests. Technology, marketing, payment and operation services can all be charged for, but the fees should be transparent, merchants should have the right to choose, and the prices should match the value of services, instead of relying on traffic control to force operators to accept transaction terms.

In this sense, this fine has initiated a more difficult competition: who can understand consumer needs more accurately, who can go deep into the industrial periphery to improve supply, and who can continue to reduce the transaction costs of the industry without depriving operators of their autonomy.

It can be said that after more than two decades of development from chaos to order, OTAs have reached the stage of redefining their own value.

This article is from the WeChat official account "DingJiao" (ID: dingjiaoone), written by Chen Dan, edited by Aaron, and published with authorization from 36Kr.