Online travel agency Ctrip.com has shared that 90% of its revenues are from domestic travelers - Chinese people traveling within China, for leisure and business.

Published: 07 Jul 2008

Online travel agency Ctrip.com has shared that 90% of its revenues are from domestic travelers - Chinese people traveling within China, for leisure and business.

An interview featuring Jane Jie Sun, Ctrip's chief financial officer (conducted by The New York Times), indicated that the remaining 10% revenue is from Chinese people traveling to other countries.

"There is one new market we are trying to target, the inbound business, to attract people in the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea and other countries to come to China. The first step we are taking is to launch our English website. If you need a hotel, we have more than 6,400 hotels in China to offer. If you need to fly to any cities, Ctrip has 100 percent coverage on all the routes. If you're on a business trip and want to do a side tour on the weekend, we can take you out. We've just launched rental cars with a driver," reportedly said Jie Sun.

On competition, Jie Sun said, "In China there is a duopoly in online travel agencies. The second one, Elong, is much smaller. Now we book more than three times the room nights of Elong, more than eight times Elong's volume in air. Package tours - they used to compete with us. After a couple of years, they dropped them. Corporate travel is new for us; they're not doing anything. Of course, the traditional mom-and-pop stores also compete with us, but we're very effective getting market share from these small shops. It's not necessary for us to buy them. Based on our execution, we can pretty much take them out."

The company is open to partnering international travel agencies.

"We talk to all the international travel agencies. What we can do potentially is to work with Priceline, Travelocity, Orbitz or even Expedia, where if they want to send customers to China, we would be the back-end operation, and we can do revenue-sharing with them. And if our customer needs to go to a foreign country, these sites can provide the services and products they need," said Jie Sun.

For full version of interview, click here:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/business/epaper/2008/07/06...

EyeforTravel is scheduled to conduct its Travel Distribution and Sales China 2008 conference in Beijing on 24-25 September this year. For more information, click here:

http://events.eyefortravel.com/tdchina/agenda.asp
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Contact Reece Gladstone at reece@eyefortravel.com, +44 207 375 7158.