BEIJING, July 31 --
China's online travel services are taking off, with even greater growth forecast
for the next few years.
Last year, at least 2.75 million Chinese booked hotel
rooms, air tickets and other travel services on the Internet, up 72 percent from
the previous year, according to a report recently released by Shanghai-based in
Research Consulting Group.
China's online travel market was worth some 1.54
billion yuan (204 million U.S. dollars) last year, a growth of 82 percent from
2005, the report said.
The findings are based on a month-long survey in
November with responses from 60,000 Internet users across China.
Analysts with the consulting company are optimistic
about China's online travel market, saying the number of users would more than
double to 5.7 million in 2008, and hit 9 million by 2010.
The online sector is expected to be worth 6.5 billion
yuan by 2010, analysts said.
Their optimism is based on three factors - the
overall bloom of tourism and the soaring amount of money netizens spend on
tourism, and improved online marketing systems.
Compared with the U.S. online travel market, with
revenues of 83 billion dollars in 2006, China's market is still small.
In the US, online sales of travel services accounted
for 30 percent of total tourism industry revenue in 2005 according to Merrill
Lynch & Co. The percentage in China is less than 1 percent, Dai Bin,
professor at Beijing International Studies University, told China Daily.
"Looking at it from the good side, this means there
is still huge potential for developing this market," he said.
But he warned that the current boom is mostly due to
a few companies.
The biggest success so far in China's online travel
market is the NASDAQ-listed Ctrip.com, accounting for 54.2 percent of the market
last year. In second place was another listed company, eLong.com, with 17.8
percent of the market.
The rest of China's travel websites, mostly for
traditional travel agencies, work as "a platform to release information, a
substitute for traditional marketing and communication", Dai said. Actual
payment is completed offline in traditional ways.
Explaining why travel agencies prefer traditional
means of payment, Hu Guodong, manager of the Internet department of Beijing UTS
International Travel Service Co Ltd, said: "If a customer uses an online payment
service, our agency has to hand 1 percent of our revenue to the bank, which is
too much to bear for travel agencies with a thin profit margin."
In contrast, if the customer pays by swiping a credit
card, the agency only pays a 0.1 percent fee to the bank, he said.
"We need the banks to give us better conditions to
make online payment more feasible," he said.
(Source: China Daily)
