Ahead of the BTS concert to be held in Busan this June, a spate of “reservation cancellations” at some lodging businesses has been found to stem from structural limitations of online booking platforms. As users flocked to make reservations at once, “overbooking” occurred.

According to Busan City and others on the 8th, as of the 2nd, a total of 129 complaints related to BTS lodging had been filed through the “Price-Gouging QR Reporting System.” Busan City has completed processing 72 of them, including “cancellations by lodging businesses” and “price-gouging reports.”

During on-site inspections of tourist lodging businesses conducted in the course of handling the complaints, the city confirmed that at 10 out of 14 locations, the online booking platforms had experienced an “overbooking” (excess reservations) problem.

Typically, on reservation platforms there is a brief wait between selecting a room for the desired date and finalizing with payment. During this interval, a surge of would-be bookers led to multiple parties being booked into a single room. Subsequently, as lodging businesses reconciled the reservations, those who had booked later were canceled, naturally leading to “reservation cancellations,” which in turn prompted complaints that “a normal reservation was canceled,” the city explained.

Of the remaining four of the 14 inspected lodging businesses, the complaints were found to have arisen from actual price hikes intended to capitalize on the BTS boom.

A Busan City official said, “No businesses received a suspension of operations as a result of this ‘price-gouging’ controversy, and in most on-site inspections, prices were corrected on the spot,” adding, “To prevent a recurrence, we have proposed that Seoul and Goyang, where BTS concerts are scheduled, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism address platform companies’ overbooking problems.”

With the controversy over price gouging tied to the BTS concert, the government launched the “Task Force for Eradicating Price Gouging” at Government Complex Seoul on the 23rd of last month. The task force plans to present a comprehensive plan to eradicate price gouging within the first quarter of this year. Earlier, the president called price gouging “a vicious abuse that destroys order across the entire market and inflicts great harm on everyone.”