A crescendo of voices builds on a typically bustling day in the Shanghai headquarters of Ctrip.com as staff put together hundreds of tourist trips. It is the sound of China’s travel boom.
Call after call comes in to Asia’s largest travel call center from mainly Chinese consumers, but also international travelers booking flights, hotels and tour packages for anywhere from Hong Kong to Havana.
“You’re getting calls from everywhere and they’re going everywhere. If you listen in, you’ll hear accents from anywhere from Hunan, Heilongjiang to India,” Ctrip senior business development manager Coley Dale said.
Travel has become a booming business in China as its economic growth has lifted incomes and given people more opportunities for leisure activities.
China recorded more than 1.9 billion domestic tourist trips in 2009, up from 280 million in 1990, with increasing numbers booking online in a country with a world-leading 457 million Internet users.
Few companies tell the story of the country’s travel surge better than Ctrip, China’s biggest online travel company.
The company booked 100,000 hotel room nights in one month for the first time in March 2002. It took another 21 months to sell 100,000 air tickets in a month.
However, last year, it had booked an average of about 1.7 million room nights and 2.5 million plane tickets a month. Its net profit for the year was 1 billion yuan (US$152 million), up 59 percent year-on-year.
About 40 percent of bookings through the company are made via the Internet. That number is constantly rising, though a lingering Chinese discomfort with Web transactions drives most Ctrip customers to make their final bookings with the company by telephone.
Either way, business is surging. Ctrip joined the NASDAQ-100, alongside rival Internet travel giant Expedia.
Its 7,000 employees at the Shanghai call center have outgrown the site and Ctrip is moving staff to a new facility north of the city, Dale said.
With room for 12,000 to 15,000 employees, the new facility has been described as the world’s biggest travel call center by San Jose, California-based Force10, which supplied the sites’ switches and data network.
Ctrip was established in 1999 — at a time when the number of domestic Chinese trips was growing by more than 20 million a year — by a group of China travel industry veterans and Silicon Valley executives.
The firm has been a key driver of industry growth by reaching out to hotels across the country and adding them to its database. Its network has grown to 17,000 hotels from 9,800 at the end of 2009.
The good times are expected to keep rolling. China’s latest five-year economic plan calls for tourism revenues to rise 10 percent annually to 2.3 trillion yuan by 2015, up from 1.44 trillion yuan last year.
“Such an increase will assure a golden age for the travel industry,” Ctrip chairman James Liang, who left Oracle Corp to co-found the company, said last month.
The selection of Chinese travel destinations is growing as the country expands its infrastructure to make remote spots easier to reach, Liang said.
Projects like Shanghai’s planned Disney theme park, expected to be completed in 2015, also promise a travel bonanza, Ctrip says.
In January, Ctrip launched Lvping.com, a hotel review and travel forum site similar to Expedia’s TripAdvisor.com.
Last year, it invested in Dining Secretary China, a free Shanghai-based online restaurant booking service that has more than 10,000 daily customers.
Yet Ctrip has only scratched the market’s surface so far, analysts say.
It now accounts for 9 percent to 10 percent of air ticket distribution in China, up from about half of that amount just three years ago, according to Morgan Stanley.
Fewer than 8 percent of China’s Internet users have booked travel services and despite its dominance, less than 3 percent of Internet users have used Ctrip, it added.
However, Ctrip also faces tough competition from Expedia, which operates Chinese booking site eLong.com.
Expedia chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said he wants China to be the “anchor” for Expedia’s Asian strategy.
The competition does not faze Ctrip chief executive Min Fan, who headed the Shanghai Travel Service Co, a leading domestic travel agency, before co-founding Ctrip.
Customer service — such as providing the option of booking over the telephone — is the key to holding on to Ctrip’s lead and finding new categories of consumers, he told analysts last month.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS