Our research has found that safe, clean, with a long history, friendly to the people, and delicious food are high-frequency words that foreign tourists associate with China. On December 18th, Ctrip Group held a Global Partner Summit in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Ctrip Group's co-founder and chairman of the board, Liang Jianzhang, and CEO, Sun Jie, among other executives, "advertised" Chinese inbound tourism on site, welcoming global partners and tourists to visit China.
Liang Jianzhang said, "The development potential of inbound tourism in China is enormous, and various pain points are gradually being resolved. Ctrip will leverage its global resources and integrated marketing advantages to become a pioneer in promoting inbound tourism and contribute to the development of the tourism economy and the enhancement of China's image
Liang Jianzhang, co-founder and chairman of Ctrip Group, delivered a keynote speech
Actively supporting the development of inbound tourism is one of Ctrip's measures to promote the high-quality development of the tourism industry. As an emerging strategic pillar industry, the high-quality development of the tourism industry is a proposition of the times. Faced with this proposition, Ctrip provides its own answer: seeking increment from the development of inbound tourism, improving efficiency from ecological updates, stimulating innovation from technological changes, bringing deterministic growth to partners, and continuously improving user experience.
Actively responding to the development policy of inbound tourism and seeking incremental growth for the industry
In recent years, the continuous implementation of various facilitation measures has driven the rapid growth of inbound tourism. On the day before the summit, inbound tourism welcomed a favorable policy again: the duration of visa free foreigners' stay in China was extended from 72 hours and 144 hours to 240 hours. Ctrip actively responds to the policy of developing inbound tourism and continues to promote the "Super China" brand in major tourist source markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. It has launched full chain products and services including transportation, accommodation, and entertainment, and built an efficient channel connecting foreign tourists with domestic tourism partners, bringing new growth to tourism partners.
In 2024, Ctrip will organize and implement over 25 large-scale inbound tourism promotion projects, including the "Shanghai Free Half Day Tour", covering more than 50 countries and regions, bringing more than 100 billion exposures to the event; Organize over 1000 overseas KOLs to promote domestic cities. Ctrip has also participated multiple times in the "Hello! China" overseas tourism promotion events hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, actively organizing overseas travel merchants to visit and explore various places in China.
In addition to regular flight and hotel booking services, Ctrip's overseas platform also offers online ticket sales services for over 10000 domestic scenic spots, over 10000 day and half day tour routes, and Ctrip's private car services for multiple cities, further facilitating the travel experience of foreign tourists.
A series of promotions, products, and services have driven the growth of Ctrip's inbound travel orders. In the first 11 months of this year, the number of inbound tourists on Ctrip platform increased by 119% year-on-year; On Ctrip's overseas platform, the traffic of "popular Chinese travel routes" increased by over 500% year-on-year; In the third quarter of this year, hotel bookings for inbound tourism on Ctrip platform increased by about 100% year-on-year. These rapidly growing numbers have also brought tangible business growth to domestic partners such as scenic spots, hotels, and travel agencies.
Sun Jie said, "We believe that the inbound tourism market will usher in a stage of high-quality development, better empowering high-level opening up to the outside world and telling the story of China in the new era. In the future, Ctrip Group will strive to serve the country well, bravely assume social responsibility; serve the people well, meet their needs for a happy life; shoulder the responsibility of industry development, serve industry chain partners to create high-quality development, and make greater contributions to the tourism industry becoming an emerging strategic pillar industry and a livelihood industry with significant characteristics of the times and a happy industry
Ctrip CEO Sun Jie delivers keynote speech
Ecological renewal helps partners achieve deterministic growth
Currently, new supply and demand are constantly emerging in the tourism market, and the industry's development has reached a turning point. What are the new driving forces for growth in the hotel accommodation industry after being driven by opening-up policies and real estate? How should traditional travel agencies respond to the emerging demand for independent travel and private group tours in the tourism industry?
For these issues, Ctrip's answer is to drive industry ecosystem updates through its own iteration, bringing more efficient and certain growth to its partners.
In the field of tourism and vacation, Ctrip has proposed the concept of Platform 3.0. The 1.0 era mainly played a role in connecting travel agencies and users, promoting transactions; In the 2.0 era, it plays a role in empowering resources such as air tickets and hotels, as well as marketing traffic. Faced with personalized and fragmented travel demands, Ctrip will evolve into Platform 3.0, creating a win-win ecosystem and working together with partners to seize the deterministic growth in dynamic changes.
Specifically, Ctrip's tourism and vacation business will iterate from the dimensions of technology ecology, business ecology, and content ecology. In the business ecosystem, Ctrip has launched a new company guidance platform, which changes the current lack of standardization and uneven service levels in company guidance services through standardization, performance mechanisms, standardized services, training mechanisms, etc., and helps well served partners obtain more orders.
In response to the hotel industry where supply exceeds demand and requires new driving forces, Ctrip proposes to iterate from dimensions such as content, technology, inbound tourism, and the silver haired population to build a new ecosystem for the hotel industry, promoting partners to increase income and profits. Taking content iteration as an example, Ctrip's word-of-mouth ranking continues to promote global hotels with unique features such as beautiful scenery and family friendly hotels, bringing 20% additional traffic and 10% additional orders to partners through the ranking; Ctrip further improves the display of hotel highlights and package products, enhances conversion and revenue. Since the beginning of this year, the ADR (average room rate) of package hotels on the platform has increased by 29%, and the overall GMV has increased by 2.2 billion yuan.
Continuously investing in technology to drive innovation driven growth
Technological innovation is an important means for Ctrip to assist its partners in their development. In recent years, Ctrip has continued to invest in AI innovation, launching a personal artificial intelligence travel assistant based on the first vertical model of the tourism industry - Ctrip Ask, and using AI and large models to transform content production, customer service, and other fields, improving the operational efficiency of the platform and partners.
In the field of hotel business, Ctrip actively improves the efficiency of information display, user search, and Q&A in all scenarios. For example, gradually providing hotel partners with image-based video AI tools to efficiently and cost effectively produce video content that meets user preferences for information acquisition; Provide digital live streaming tools for hotel merchants to help them obtain live streaming traffic at low cost. At the same time, Ctrip also plans to upgrade its products such as image search hotels for pre booking scenarios, in order to improve the efficiency of users finding target hotels and provide more efficient transaction links for merchants.
In the field of tourism and vacation, Ctrip has launched the Open API platform to address the current situation of "miscellaneous and scattered" content, products, and services in the field of scenic spots and entertainment. Ctrip has taken the lead in following OCTO standards globally to achieve standardized implementation of scenic spot entertainment content. This platform can effectively solve the problems of inconsistent data structures, non-standard information formats, and difficult interconnection between various supplier systems for many scenic spots and entertainment products at home and abroad, significantly improving the efficiency of merchant information input and display quality.
In the field of airline tickets, Ctrip continues to promote direct airline connections, continuously reducing the "booking ratio" and helping airlines reduce operating costs. For example, in August this year, Ctrip Group reached a strategic cooperation with Ryanair: passengers who book Ryanair flights through Ctrip's overseas platform will have their order information directly provided to Ryanair, and users can also receive important flight information in a timely manner to enhance their experience.
In the field of business travel, Ctrip invests in technology to help customers reduce costs and increase efficiency. Over the past year, we have helped our clients save a total of 3.9 billion yuan on travel expenses. Since the beginning of this year, investment in production and research has increased by over 260% year-on-year, driving the improvement of supply chain quality, internal management efficiency, and employee travel experience.
The summit will be held in the United Arab Emirates, which is the first country in the Middle East to achieve comprehensive visa free access with China. Since the beginning of this year, Chinese tourists' outbound travel orders to Abu Dhabi have increased by over 75% year-on-year, and Abu Dhabi tourists' travel orders to China have increased nearly four times year-on-year. At the summit, Ctrip Group also reached a global strategic cooperation agreement with the Abu Dhabi Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Ctrip's global platform will increase the display of products and services such as Abu Dhabi's tourist attractions and vacation experiences, providing high-quality travel experiences for tourists and enhancing Abu Dhabi's global visibility as a top tier tourist destination and the length of stay for international tourists.