How a Casual Online Booking Can Link You, Click by Click, to Repression in East Turkistan

November 4, 2025

A UHRP Insights column by Dr. Henryk Szadziewski, Director of Research, and Peter Irwin, Associate Director for Research and Advocacy

Open your browser, go to Booking.com, and search for a hotel in “Xinjiang.” Within seconds, major international hotel brands populate the screen: Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Wyndham, InterContinental (IHG), and Accor.

Now try the same with Expedia. You’ll see that these sites facilitate bookings in a region where the Chinese government is committing atrocity crimes against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.

We know this because we did it ourselves. In April 2025, the Uyghur Human Rights Project published an investigation into the expansion of international hotel chains in East Turkistan, the name used by Uyghurs for Xinjiang, uncovering nearly 200 hotels either open or in planning or construction phases.

What we found was an entire architecture of complicity. Hotels operated on land controlled by a sanctioned entity, hosted state propaganda events that erased Uyghur identity, and, in Hilton’s case, opened a property in 2024 on the site of a demolished mosque despite earlier criticism.

Yet just as damning as the hotel brands themselves is the digital infrastructure that makes their continued operation highly profitable: third-party booking platforms.

Booking Holdings (owner of Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, and Kayak) brought in $23.7 billion in revenue in 2024, while Expedia Group (owner of Expedia, Hotels.com, and Trivago) made $12.8 billion. That puts them on par with, or exceeding the revenue of, the world’s largest hotel chains, underscoring that these platforms are industry giants. For each reservation, third-party operators typically take a commission of 10 to 25 percent, a hefty cut that directly ties their profits to hotels in the Uyghur Region.

Third-party booking platforms claim to act as neutral intermediaries in the travel industry, but their role in facilitating bookings in regions undergoing conflict can be far from passive. In the Uyghur homeland, they are actively earning revenue from tourism and business travel to a region under international scrutiny for atrocity crimes. Airbnb, for example, made this neutrality case when it was criticized for listing homes on land controlled by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a state-run paramilitary entity and corporate conglomerate, which is sanctioned by the US, Canada, UK, and EU for serious human rights violations. The XPCC has also been added to the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act “Entity List” for its central role in coercive labor transfers and forced labor schemes.

The notion of “platform exceptionalism”—the idea that digital intermediaries can claim neutrality and avoid responsibility for human rights impacts—doesn’t hold up under established international norms. Corporations, especially those with global reach and influence, are still obligated to international rights standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which require companies to avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts, and to prevent or mitigate impacts linked to their operations.

Statements from third-party booking platforms reveal just how far removed their rhetoric is from their practices. Booking Holdings says in its 2022 Human Rights Statement it will “take appropriate action where we determine we may be directly linked to negative human rights impacts through the activities of our listings.” Similarly, Expedia Group claims “We continually develop new partnerships to help safeguard human rights and address the particular challenges of human trafficking or forced labor in the hospitality industry.”

However, sites owned by Booking Holdings and Expedia Group advertise IHG’s Holiday Inn Express Urumqi Station, which is located on territory run by the XPCC. Two other international hotels on XPCC territory, the Wyndham Urumqi North and the Holiday Inn Express Horgos (IHG), are also available on Booking.com and Expedia.

The connections also extend to complicity in state-imposed forced labor. Accor’s Grand Mercure Urumqi Hualing has recruited and trained workers through state-run “labor transfer” schemes, programs that experts identify as core mechanisms of coercion and assimilation. Accor’s partner in China, H World, has likewise used “Xinjiang Aid” initiatives for staffing, another program associated with forced labor risks. Yet Booking.com and Expedia continue to list the Grand Mercure as if it were just another hotel, concealing the coercion built into its operations.

This gap between rhetoric and practice is not without precedent. Travel booking platforms have faced criticism for listing properties in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Human rights groups and journalists have documented how Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia profit from war crimes and support illegal settlements. Airbnb, for example, announced in 2018 that it would remove about 200 listings in West Bank settlements, only to reverse course just months later. Booking.com continues to offer rooms in Israeli settlements, including in East Jerusalem.

The same pattern of economic normalization can be seen in the Uyghur Region. Third-party booking platforms make leisure travel to the Uyghur Region seem ordinary, and give consumers no warning that they are booking travel in a region under intense state control.

In order to meet their stated commitments to respect human rights and avoid being directly linked to adverse impacts, platforms like Booking.com and Expedia should immediately remove all hotel listings located in the Uyghur Region. In parallel, governments should investigate whether third-party booking platforms are violating sanctions by listing hotels located on XPCC territory. To continue listing these properties perpetuates atrocity crimes through a type of digital supply chain. 

Governments and civil society actors have done much to condemn the Chinese government’s policies in the Uyghur Region. But words are no match for the reality of continued commercial engagement. 

In August, the U.S. State Department reaffirmed its designation of China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide. You might expect that corporations would act accordingly and end their business in the region. Yet third-party booking sites continue to profit from hotel reservations there, hiding behind the platform exceptionalism claim; that is, they merely connect travelers with accommodations and are therefore uninvolved in human rights abuses.

When companies like Booking.com or Expedia treat the Uyghur Region as just another destination, they expose the fatal flaw in the current human rights playbook. If corporate actors are left to operate unchallenged by governments, we’re not confronting atrocities, we’re helping to fund them.

When someone books a hotel room in the Uyghur Region, they may not know the human cost behind the listing, but the companies facilitating that booking must. And it’s long past time they were held accountable.