China's top chatbot won't sell hotels a better ranking. It takes 12% instead.
When Doubao, the chatbot from the company behind TikTok, sends a guest to book on its sister app, the hotel now pays 12% instead of 8%
by Markus Busch
What changed. Doubao is the AI assistant from ByteDance, the company behind TikTok. It is China's answer to ChatGPT, used for everything from homework to search, and the country's most-used chatbot, with 382 million monthly users in May, according to the research firm QuestMobile.
A traveler can ask it for a quiet hotel near the sea at around 400 yuan a night, and it answers with names. Tap one and the booking closes on Douyin, TikTok's Chinese twin, or on Dianping, a review app owned by its rival Meituan. Doubao holds no rooms of its own.
Until this summer, bookings that reached Douyin this way settled as ordinary Douyin orders at about 8%. On July 27, Douyin's local-services arm published a policy that made Doubao a channel in its own right. A hotel booking that starts in the chatbot and closes on Douyin now carries an 11.4% software service fee plus a 0.6% payment fee. Call it 12%. It replaces the 8%, and it appears on the hotel's settlement under its own label: Doubao. The start slipped from August 10 to August 20 while Douyin collected objections from merchants.
On a 500-yuan room, the hotel used to give up 40 yuan. Now it gives up 60.
The ranking is off the table. When the news broke, Doubao's head of PR said the assistant runs no paid promotion and charges no advertising fee, and that no merchant can pay to move up a recommendation. The fee falls due only when a booking completes.
That is a choice about how a chatbot earns money from a hotel, and OpenAI made the other one. ChatGPT sells a sponsored line under its answers, open to self-service buyers in Europe since August 31. In a July sample of US answers counted by a search-tools vendor, Booking.com held six in ten of the travel slots. A guest who books through that line still costs the hotel the OTA's commission.
Doubao has no seat to bid for. Every hotel's place in the answer is set by what the traveler asked. The price comes afterward, on every booking, at one rate.
Who pays it. An auction charges the hotels that choose to bid. A booking fee charges every hotel the chatbot sends a guest to, whether it wanted the channel or not. That includes the regular who would have found the hotel on Douyin anyway, the case merchants complained about across the Chinese business press in August.
According to the Chinese business site Huxiu, a hotel can't close the Doubao channel on its own. It has to apply to leave at store level, under criteria Douyin hasn't published.
The limits. The policy covers bookings made inside China. The promise of no paid ranking is ByteDance's own, and nothing outside the company checks it. Douyin says Doubao's hotel orders rose more than 56% over the October holiday but gave no base, so there is no count to check that against either. Reporters who compared Doubao's prices with Trip.com's and the hotels' own found it dearer in some cases and cheaper in others.
The price. A hotel manager in Shandong told Dazhong News that the OTAs charge his property 11% to 13%. The chatbot that won't sell a better spot charges inside that range. On the statement, the line reads Doubao.
Read also: ChatGPT starts selling ads in Europe next week, but hotels can't buy them directly yet
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