Fliggy Backs China’s Regulator on Hotel Booking Platform Guidance

The significance lies less in the specific pledges than in the venue: a joint administrative guidance meeting signals that platform conduct in hotel distribution is now being treated as a competition and pricing-autonomy issue, not merely a consumer-protection one. The naming of "exclusive partnerships" and "lowest price across the entire network" clauses targets the mechanisms that lock merchants into a single demand channel. Fliggy's public compliance pledge invites scrutiny of whether rivals follow, and whether enforcement moves from guidance to formal action. Whether merchants gain genuine pricing room, or the practices simply migrate to less visible contract terms, is the open question.