Travel Weather Woes and Thoughts on China's Travel Market

We're huge fans of domestic train travel here at the Talking Travel desk, but those railway marvels aren't impervious to the weather. One of our colleagues here at the Beijinger saw his train journey from Beijing to Hangzhou transform from a 5.5-hour excursion into a grueling, nearly 12-hour ride, including an almost two-hour delay, another hour of waiting on the train, and then much of the journey done at half speed. Yikes. Anyway, next time you buy train tickets, consider using the NiHao App, it may make the process easier.

Travel industry publication Skift is a great read for both the professional and the casual traveler. It recently gathered statements from 10 of the travel industry's top CEOs, both in China and elsewhere, and it provides interesting insight to the coming year.

"We’re not winning in the way that we wish to and so from – the team has – in China has come back and said, ‘Hey, here’s a set of things that we need to do differently to succeed in a particular space within the China travel landscape.’ Outbound travel, you can see on the site is a particular highlight of ours and it does in fact resonate with Chinese travelers, because we have a phenomenal amount of international content," said Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor.

"Our hotel partners and our air partners want access to that outbound traveler. We can certainly give them access through partnerships. And we’re also building on an organic basis. We launched Expedia China, a hotel-only site. We’ll look to build it organically over a period of time," said Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia, Inc. One of our other Beijinger colleagues will have some choice words about Expedia and their service in a future edition of Talking Travel.

"In the past we have very rapidly established [Qunar] as the Chinese top B2C [business to consumer] channel for hotel booking. On peak days over the summer our room nights stayed already represented around 10 percent of China’s total hotel market. With our rapidly expanding scale, now is the right time to start to leverage a merchant model in a strategic deliberate way. After the Ctrip/Elong deal, hotels actually are more coming to us because we are their last alternative channel," said CC Zhuang of Qunar.

For the full article, click here. Until Thursday, one road flat safe.

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Email: stevenschwankert@thebeijinger.com
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