“Our research found that safety, cleanliness, long history, friendly people, delicious food and so on are the high-frequency words of foreign tourists' impression of China.” On December 18, Ctrip Group held a global partner summit in Abu Dhabi, UAE, where Ctrip Group Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors Liang Jianzhang, Ctrip Group CEO Sun Jie and other senior executives were on hand to “advertise” for China's inbound tours, and to welcome global partners and tourists from all over the world to play in China.

Mr. Liang said, “China's inbound tourism has great potential for development, and the pain points are gradually being solved. Ctrip will utilize its global resources and integrated marketing advantages to be the pioneer in promoting inbound tourism, and contribute to the development of the tourism economy and the enhancement of China's image.”

Actively contributing to the development of inbound tourism is one of Ctrip's initiatives to boost the high-quality development of the tourism industry. As an emerging strategic pillar industry, tourism's high-quality development is the proposition of the times. In the face of this proposition, Ctrip has given its own answer: to look for incremental growth in the development of inbound tourism, to improve efficiency in ecological renewal, to stimulate innovation in technological change, to bring certainty of growth to partners, and to bring continuous improvement in user experience.

Actively responding to the development policy of inbound tourism and seeking incremental growth for the industry

In recent years, various facilitation measures have led to rapid growth in inbound tourism. The day before the summit, inbound tourism welcomed another favorable policy: the length of stay for foreigners in transit without visas was extended from 72 hours and 144 hours to 240 hours. Ctrip responded positively to the development of inbound tourism by promoting the “Super China” brand in major inbound tourism source markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea, and uploading the whole chain of products and services such as transportation, accommodation, and entertainment, to build an efficient channel connecting foreign tourists with domestic travel industry partners, and bring new incremental capacity to the travel industry partners. New Incremental Volume.

In 2024, Ctrip will organize and implement more than 25 large-scale inbound tourism promotions, including the “Free Half-Day Shanghai Inbound Tour”, which will cover more than 50 countries and regions, and bring exposure to more than 100 billion people; it will also organize more than 1,000 overseas KOLs to promote domestic cities. Ctrip has also participated in the “Hello China” overseas tourism promotion seminars organized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism! China” overseas tourism promotion seminars organized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and actively organizes overseas travelers to visit many places in China and step on routes.

In addition to regular air ticket and hotel booking services, Ctrip's overseas platform has also launched online ticketing services for more than 10,000 domestic scenic spots, more than 10,000 day and half-day tour routes, and Ctrip's special car service in many cities, further facilitating the travel experience of foreign tourists.

A series of promotions and products and services have driven the growth of Ctrip's inbound tour orders. In the first 11 months of this year, the number of inbound travelers on Ctrip's platform increased by 119% year-on-year; on Ctrip's overseas platform, the flow of “popular China travel routes” increased by more than 500% year-on-year; and in the third quarter of this year, the number of hotel bookings for inbound tours on Ctrip's platform increased by about 100% year-on-year. These fast-growing figures have also brought real business growth to domestic scenic spots, hotels, travel agencies and other partners.

We believe that the inbound tourism market will usher in a phase of high-quality development, which will better enable high-level opening up and tell the story of China in the new era,” said Sun Jie. In the future, Ctrip Group will endeavor to serve the country well and bear social responsibility; serve the people well and meet their needs for a happy life; take up the heavy responsibility of industry development, serve industry chain partners to create high-quality development, and make greater contributions to making the tourism industry a newly emerging strategic pillar industry and a people's livelihood industry and a happiness industry with distinctive characteristics of the times.”

Ecological Renewal Helps Partners Grow with Certainty

At present, new supply and new demand are emerging in the tourism market, and the development of the industry has reached an inflection point. After the hotel and lodging industry has experienced the open-door policy drive and real estate drive, where is the new driving force for growth? Travel industry, free travel, private tours of the new demand erupted, traditional travel agencies how to deal with?

Ctrip's answer to these questions is to drive the industry ecosystem through its own iteration and bring more efficient and certain growth to its partners.

In the field of tourism and vacation, Ctrip puts forward the concept of platform 3.0. 1.0 era mainly plays the role of connecting travel agencies and users to promote transactions; 2.0 era assumes the role of empowering resources such as air tickets and hotels, as well as the role of marketing traffic empowerment. In the face of personalized and fragmented travel demand, Ctrip will evolve into Platform 3.0 to create a win-win ecosystem, and work with partners to seize the certainty of growth in the midst of dynamic change.

Specifically, Ctrip's travel and vacation business will be iterated from the dimensions of technology ecology, business ecology, and content ecology. For example, in the business ecology, Ctrip has launched a new driver-guide platform, which will change the current shortcomings of the lack of standardization of driver-guide services and the uneven level of service through the standardization of standards, performance mechanisms, standardized services, training mechanisms, etc., and help partners with good service to get more orders.

For the hotel industry, where supply exceeds demand and a new driving force is needed, Ctrip proposes to build a new ecosystem for the hotel industry by iterating from the dimensions of content, technology, inbound tourism, and the silver-haired population, so as to promote partners' income and profit. Taking content iteration as an example, Ctrip's word-of-mouth list continues to promote hotels with special features such as global scenic beauty and family-friendly hotels, bringing partners 20% additional traffic and 10% additional orders through the list; Ctrip further improves the display of hotel highlights and package products to enhance conversion and revenue, and 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 growth through innovation

Technological innovation is an important means for Ctrip to help its partners develop. In recent years, Ctrip has continued to invest in AI innovation, launching a personal AI travel assistant based on the industry's first pendant big model - Ctrip Ask - and utilizing AI and big models to transform content production, customer service and other areas to improve the platform and partners' operational efficiency.

In the hotel business, Ctrip actively improves the efficiency of information display, user search and Q&A in the whole scene. For example, Ctrip will gradually provide hotel partners with AI tools for graphic video, which can produce video content that meets the user's information acquisition preferences more efficiently and at a lower cost; and provide hotel merchants with digital human live broadcasting tools, which can help them obtain live broadcasting traffic at a low cost. At the same time, Ctrip also plans to upgrade products such as TuSuoHotel for users' pre-booking scenarios, so as to improve the efficiency of users in finding target hotels and provide merchants with more efficient transaction links.

In the field of tourism and vacation, Ctrip launched the Open API (Open Interface) platform for the current situation of “miscellaneous and scattered” content, products and services in the field of attractions and entertainment, and took the lead in following the OCTO standard globally to realize the standardization of attractions and entertainment content. The platform can effectively solve the problems of inconsistent data structure, non-standardized information format, and difficult interconnection between the systems of various suppliers of domestic and international attractions and entertainment products, and significantly improve the efficiency of merchant information entry and display quality.

The UAE, where the summit is held, is the first country in the Middle East to realize full mutual visa exemption with China. Since the beginning of this year, the year-on-year growth of travel orders for Chinese tourists traveling out of Abu Dhabi has exceeded 75%, and the year-on-year growth of travel orders for Abu Dhabi tourists traveling to China has nearly quadrupled. At the summit, Ctrip Group also reached a global strategic cooperation with the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. Ctrip's global platform will increase the display of Abu Dhabi's tourist attractions, vacation experiences and other products and services to provide tourists with high-quality travel experiences, and enhance Abu Dhabi's global visibility as a top tourist destination and the length of stay for international tourists.