In early September, an InterContinental hotel in Hefei, Anhui province, China, was thrust into the spotlight by multiple media outlets over breakfast vouchers worth just a few yuan.
One user reportedly bought a breakfast voucher for a five-star hotel on Xianyu, Alibaba’s secondhand marketplace. After sitting down and getting halfway through breakfast, the customer was asked to leave by hotel staff. The hotel later found that the seller had previously posed as a hotel guest and called the hotel, threatening to leave a bad review if complimentary breakfast was not provided. The account was subsequently blacklisted by the hotel.
But even after the case was repeatedly reported by the media, similar breakfast vouchers continued to flood the platform. Waiting for users to report them clearly cannot keep pace with the speed at which sellers list new ones.
As breakfast vouchers costing just a few yuan （about USD 1） began being sold nationwide, hotels grew increasingly unwilling to foot the bill for sellers. With more and more people showing up at restaurants using fake room numbers, some hotels have finally started posting notices at their entrances making clear that such claims will be refused.
The tactics may involve no physical confrontation, but they create pressure through negative reviews, complaints and online exposure. Such non-physical coercion has become increasingly common online.
The tactics used by these Xianyu breakfast sellers fit the pattern almost perfectly.
They fabricate problems with hotel facilities, pose as guests to pressure hotels into providing free breakfasts, and then resell the vouchers. The entire process is wrapped in the language of consumer rights, but there is no genuine dispute behind it. The sole objective is profit.
In the past, hotels often treated such incidents as difficult customer complaints. Give away a few breakfasts and move on.
Today, however, many hotels are facing something closer to professionalized fraudulent claims.
Some hotels have already made their refusal explicit at the door. And the hotel industry's pushback is only just beginning.
