Open your browser, go to Booking.com, and search for a hotel in “Xinjiang.” Within seconds, major international hotel brands—Accor, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental (IHG), Marriott, Wyndham—populate the screen.
Now try the same with Expedia. You’ll see that both these sites facilitate bookings in a region where the Chinese government is committing atrocity crimes against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.
In April 2025, the Uyghur Human Rights Project published an investigation into the expansion of international hotel chains in the Uyghur Region that uncovered nearly 200 hotels either in planning, under construction, or open. What we found was an entire architecture of complicity. Hotels participated in state-sponsored labor transfer programs operated on land controlled by an organization that has been sanctioned for human rights abuses. In 2024, Hilton even opened a property on the site of a demolished mosque despite earlier criticism.
Beyond the activities of the hotel brands themselves, those of third-party booking platforms—the digital infrastructure that makes their continued operation highly profitable—are equally damning.
Booking platforms profit from human rights abuses
Booking Holdings (owner of Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, and Kayak) made $23.7 billion in 2024, and Expedia Group (owner of Expedia, Hotels.com, and Trivago) made $12.8 billion, revenues on par with the world’s largest hotel chains. Taking commissions of 10 to 25 percent per booking, these platforms directly profit from hotels operating in the Uyghur Region.
Third-party booking platforms claim to act as neutral intermediaries in the travel industry. Airbnb, for example, defended listing rentals on land controlled by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a state-run paramilitary entity and corporate conglomerate, sanctioned by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union for serious human rights violations.
However, the role of third-party booking platforms in facilitating travel to regions undergoing conflict is anything but passive. They are actively earning revenue from tourism and business travel to the Uyghur homeland, a region under international scrutiny as the site of atrocity crimes.
Platform exceptionalism and the illusion of neutrality
“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 obligated to observe international rights agreements, including the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These standards require companies to avoid causing or contributing to human rights violations, and to prevent or mitigate negative impacts from their operations.
Statements from third-party booking platforms reveal the gulf between their rhetoric and their practices. Booking Holdings says it will “take appropriate action” when it determines “we may be directly linked to negative human rights impacts through the activities of our listings.” 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.”
Sites owned by Booking Holdings and Expedia Group, however, 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 IGH’s Holiday Inn Express Horgos, are also available on Booking.com and Expedia.
The connections also extend to complicity in state-imposed forced labor. An Accor hotel in Ürümchi recruited and trained workers through state-run “labor transfer” schemes that experts identify as mechanisms of forced labor. Accor’s partner in China, H World, has likewise used “Xinjiang Aid” initiatives associated with forced labor for staffing. Yet Booking.com and Expedia continue to list the hotel in question as if it were just another property, concealing the coercion built into its operations.
This gap between rhetoric and practice is not without precedent. For example, travel booking platforms have faced criticism for listing properties in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Human rights groups, corporate accountability organizations, and journalists have documented how Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia profit from war crimes and support illegal settlements.
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 stays in a region under intense state control.
Next steps
To meet their stated commitments to respecting human rights and avoiding direct connection to abuses, platforms like Booking.com and Expedia should immediately remove all hotel listings located in the Uyghur Region. At the same time, governments should investigate whether third-party booking platforms are at risk of violating sanctions by listing hotels located on XPCC territory. To continue listing these properties creates a digital supply chain that perpetuates atrocity crimes.
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 US State Department reaffirmed its designation of China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide. You might expect corporations to act accordingly and end their business in the region. Yet third-party booking sites continue to profit from hotel reservations there, hiding behind claims that they merely connect travelers with accommodations and are therefore uninvolved in human rights abuses.
When Booking.com and Expedia treat the Uyghur Region as just another destination, they expose a 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 certainly do. And it’s long past time they were held accountable.
