Anhui Regulators Issue Rules on Hotel Room Pricing During Peak Periods

Key points

• The Anhui Provincial Administration for Market Regulation, the Provincial Development and Reform Commission, the Provincial Department of Commerce, and the Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism jointly issued a notice regulating hotel room prices during major holidays, tourism peaks, key examination periods, and major events.
• The notice prohibits four categories of violations: failure to clearly mark prices, price fraud, price gouging, and price collusion; it requires conspicuous price display, full disclosure of items and services in package sales, and encourages publishing peak-period room rates at least 15 days in advance.
• It cracks down on price fraud such as fabricated original prices, fake discounts, and luring customers with low prices then settling at high prices, with particular emphasis on unilateral cancellation of confirmed orders without justified reason or demanding consumers pay the difference.
• For online trading platforms, it requires establishing price compliance review mechanisms and accurately displaying room rates, room types, and cancellation/change rules, and targets forcing or effectively forcing operators to join price promotions, enabling automatic price-matching systems, and using data algorithms or traffic rules to drive sharp price increases.
• It regulates platform fees, focusing on unreasonable charges and newly added fee items without operator consent, and targets abnormal pricing such as big-data price discrimination and fake discounts.
• It encourages government and enterprise guesthouses and training centers to open to the public to ease short-term accommodation supply-demand gaps, and proposes exploring an advance compensation mechanism.
• On enforcement, it emphasizes cross-departmental joint supervision and information sharing, improves room price monitoring in key areas, explores an industry red-and-black list, and incorporates price compliance into star-rated hotel and graded homestay assessments and reviews.