Reduce hotel price "involution," Ctrip will deactivate the "Price Adjustment Assistant"

Recently, there have been market reports that Ctrip will soon remove the “Pricing Adjustment Assistant.” On March 8, a reporter confirmed with Ctrip that starting from March 10, 2026, the Ebooking management backend of Ctrip will discontinue the “AI Business Assistant” (Pricing Adjustment Assistant) feature.

Ctrip stated: “After we introduced the pricing adjustment tool in response to industry trends, we gradually received optimization suggestions from various parties. We also fully recognize that this type of automatic pricing tool, widely used in the hotel and travel industry, no longer meets the current high-quality development requirements of the industry. Now, we are taking the lead in removing this tool to reduce irrational price competition among hotels, expand merchants’ autonomous pricing space and profitability, and further motivate merchants to invest in and improve service quality.”

Ctrip also said that research shows that after the automatic pricing tool is discontinued, many merchants still objectively need platform-provided pricing references and operational guidance due to limitations in their own manpower and operational capacity, to improve efficiency and sales results. Therefore, Ctrip will continue to provide advice and guidance to merchants through the “Operational Guidance” and “Data Center” sections of E-Booking. These suggestions are only for informational and reference purposes.

It is understood that in the online hotel booking sector (OTA), major platforms generally offer various pricing tools to help merchants improve pricing efficiency, accelerate room sales, and increase order conversion. Ctrip is also the first domestic OTA platform to announce the discontinuation of the “Pricing Adjustment Assistant.”

Liu Yuanju, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, believes that in recent years, automatic pricing tools have been widely used across major internet platforms. From the original intention, these tools are technical means to help merchants improve the efficiency of dynamic price management. However, from the perspective of long-term healthy market development, such tools weaken merchants’ ability to set prices independently based on their own operations, thereby reducing their space to compete on service quality and differentiation.

Recently, Ctrip actively responded to the national policy guidance of “countering vicious internal competition” by voluntarily removing its “Pricing Adjustment Assistant” feature. This move, from platform involvement in merchant pricing to fully returning pricing autonomy to merchants, plays a positive role in reshaping a healthy competitive ecosystem in the internet platform industry. Discontinuing this tool is believed to help break the cycle of “low-price competition” on platforms, shifting the focus from price wars to service optimization, experience innovation, and management capability enhancement.

For hotels and other merchants, this allows them to better develop differentiated pricing strategies based on their market positioning and service levels, returning to the core of business operation. For the industry as a whole, this adjustment helps alleviate excessive price competition, encouraging platforms to become rule-transparent, support diverse competition, and serve as fair and orderly service hubs, which is conducive to maintaining a healthy market competition ecosystem. Ultimately, consumers will benefit as price formation becomes more decentralized and rational, supporting market diversification and long-term improvements in service quality and industry innovation.

However, it should be noted that maintaining a healthy market environment cannot be substantially improved by the efforts of a single company alone. Currently, similar tools are still widely used across tourism, e-commerce, and other industries. In the long run, major platforms need to collectively phase out tools that may adversely affect price mechanisms, strengthen self-discipline, and establish collaborative governance mechanisms with regulators, operators, and consumers to promote fair, orderly, and sustainable platform development.

Previously, Ctrip’s financial report showed that in 2025, the core OTA business transaction volume was approximately 1.1 trillion yuan, with a net revenue of 62.4 billion yuan, a commission rate of about 5% to 6%, and a net profit of 13.4 billion yuan after investment income, with a net profit margin of about 1% of transaction volume. In 2025, nearly 70,000 Chinese merchants placed inbound tourism orders through Ctrip’s overseas platforms for the first time, including over 63,000 hotels, 2,500 attractions, and about 600 travel agencies.

Additionally, the reporter learned that Ctrip recently appointed Wu Yihong and Xiao Yang as new directors. After this adjustment, the proportion of independent directors on the board increased from 50% in 2025 to 62.5%, and the proportion of female directors increased from 12.5% in 2025 to 37.5%. A Ctrip spokesperson stated, “This change helps gather a broader range of professional perspectives and industry experience, improving the quality of board decision-making and governance efficiency. It is also a concrete practice of the company’s commitment to social value, diversity, and supporting female leadership development.”

Regarding the earlier resignation of directors Fan Min and Ji Qi, Ctrip said: “The two founders, with their foresight and sense of responsibility, laid a solid foundation for the company’s development. As co-founders, Mr. Fan Min and Mr. Ji Qi will continue to be strong supporters of the company and accompany its long-term growth.”

In recent years, regulatory authorities in capital markets, securities exchanges, and many investors have raised higher requirements for corporate governance of listed companies, including increasing or maintaining a high proportion of independent directors, improving director rotation mechanisms, and promoting gender diversity on boards. As early as June last year, Ctrip explicitly stated to shareholders that it would continue to refresh and optimize its board composition to ensure that the board always has professional perspectives aligned with business development, effectively overseeing the company’s evolving strategies and potential risks.

Chief Reporter Yuan Jingxian, Shenzhen Business Daily·Du Chuang Client