Open Alibaba Group’s Amap app and search for a hotel. On the page, Trip.com, Fliggy, Qunar, and eLong appear side by side, each showing its price.
Pick the cheapest one, tap through, and book. At no point does Amap sign a contract with any hotel.
All it does is one simple thing: place other platforms’ inventory on its own “shelves” and display the price.
This isn’t a one-off experiment by a single platform.
In 2025, JD.com announced a zero-commission entry into the hotel and travel sector—50,000 hotels applied within two days. TikTok’s travel GMV surged by RMB 30 billion (USD 4.4 billion) in a year. Didi’s enterprise platform integrated ride-hailing and hotel bookings.
Every platform with high-frequency user touchpoints is now entering the same industry.
Trip.com still earns the highest profit margins in the internet sector: a 32% net margin in 2024, surpassing Coca-Cola.
But the challenge it faces is no longer just a competitor—it’s a generational shift: when navigation apps, short video platforms, and e-commerce services effortlessly book hotels, tapping the Trip.com app is becoming redundant.
In September 2025, Amap launched its Street Ranking feature. On the first day, it attracted over 40 million users. By October, daily active users surpassed 70 million, pushing Amap’s MAU from 950 million to 996 million—a single-month increase of over 46 million.
Within 100 days, 860,000 merchants had joined, order volume grew over 330% month-on-month, and revenue increased by more than 270%. A navigation app had turned local services into a traffic engine. Users no longer need to “search after reaching the destination”; they just need a decision path shorter than opening Trip.com.
What Amap wants isn’t the supply chain—it’s the entry point.
And this is what keeps OTAs uneasy. Amap and Baidu Maps aren’t trying to take the hotel business; they’re simply turning hotel booking into a bonus feature of navigation. For Amap, hotel reservations are a peripheral function fueled by hundreds of millions of users, with nearly zero marginal cost. For Trip.com, it’s the bulk of the business.
