[photopress:IT_Ctrip.jpg,full,alignright]Booking travel online works most of the time. In come countries the percentages of online as opposed to agency booking are very high. Most airlines will tell you their aim is to get it to 100%. It matters not if it is an online travel agency or a direct purchase.
The old business of printing out tickets is very last year unless it is a mult-destination trip in which case it makes sense.
So if online travel booking is bound to increase, which it is, then business for online travel agents should be good. And, in China, this is indeed the case.
Ctrip.com, which is the biggest company in this business, has reported stronger than expected second quarter resultsshowing growing interest in online flight, hotel and vacation package bookings.
Ctrip’s Net revenues jumped 52% year-on-year to $37.8m. Ctrip’s strongest growth was in air ticket sales, which rose 67% over the previoust year. The company sold about 2.55 million air tickets during the three months from April to June. Ctrip’s CFO Jie Sun said Ctrip is now handling approximately 5% of all ticket sales by China’s airlines.
However, the company’s forecast of 35% sales growth in the third quarter is slightly below many analysts’ earlier estimates. Which may well show a weakness in the techniques used by the analysts.
In related news, Japanese online retailer and travel agent, Rakuten, yesterday announced that it is selling its stake in Ctrip for approximately $575m — in part because its own Chinese operation is now large enough to be a competitor to Ctrip.
Ctrip executives said they did not expect the sale to have a significant impact on their operations. Difficult to follow that line of reason. Half a billion here and half a billion there and soon you are talking real money.
Source: VNU.net
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