E-commerce stands for the development direction of future trading, and its applications bring more and more benefits to the society and economy. E-commerce has become one of the largest sources for global economy growth, and the modern electronic trading measures with strong vitality have become increasingly recognized. Considering the total scale of global e-commerce trading, e-tourism has taken 1/5 of the shares.
In the meanwhile, as a new tourism information platform, network supplies new opportunities for the tourism industry. According to the report of Jupiter Research, in America, the online tourism market revenue was 54 billion US dollars in 2004, which took 20% of the total tourism market revenue. While in China, the total tourism market scale reached 528.6 billion RMB in 2005.According to the statistical data released by China Nation Tour Authority in Sep 2005, the annual online tourism market scale was 4-5 billion RMB, only accounting for 1% of the total tourism market scale. This shows that there's an enormous development potential for China's e-tourism market.
The revenue from tourism and recreation websites reached 1.25 billion RMB in 2005 and it is estimated to be over13 billion RMB by 2010.
Market scale of China's tourism and recreation websites
Tourism websites sprang up outside China, However, it now attracts more and mare Chinese network companies and travel agencies. The enormous competitive pressure and considerable profit make some traditional powerful travel agencies such as CNS and CYTS jumped into the realm. Online tourism service will make serious impact on traditional tourist agencies, drawing more and more attentions, some middle and small agencies will gradually out of the game.
Currently, the basic client groups in e-tourism market are high level businessmen with powerful consuming ability. However, with the overall increase of the national income, individual tourist will become the main income source for e-tourism markets.
According to the statistics from China Tour Authority, 97% of the total tourists are Chinese, and 92% of them are individuals and small groups. Considering the client structure for CTRIP, commercial clients account for 88%, but traveling and enjoying leisure time is becoming a zealous life style for young groups with active thoughts and middle -high income. Moreover, Chinese Internet citizens (111 million by Jan, 2006) are expanding rapidly. All of those people are the potential e-tourism consumers.
Now, in China, many tourism websites only provide brief introduction of travel destinations and tour route, but few actually realized the function of e-tourism. C-trip, Huaxia Tour Web and China Tour Consultation web are the three largest tourism websites.
Currently c-trip is the biggest domestic e-tourism website as well as the earliest listed e-tourism company. E-long is the second biggest, which listed on NASDAQ in Oct 2004.
For the quarter three of 2005, C-trip's net revenue was RMB 140.5 million, up by 11.5% as compared with the Q2 and its year-on-year growth rate was 59.6%.The net profit for the company was RMB 65.5 million in 2005, up by 71% compared to the year of 2004.
Quarterly net revenue and growth rate for C-trip during 2004-2005
Tourism websites have more advantages than tour companies. Compared with traditional tour companies, information of tour websites is richer, with more reasonable operation modes. Tourists can collect texts, pictures, travel notes, travel destination, accommodation, traffic and other information and can surf other related websites with links and search engines. Tour resource owners and consumers benefited from the characteristics of tour websites such as regional break; economical travel resource integration and no store operations and so on.
The enormous advantages of tourism websites make them able to be integrated with traditional tourism business.. If traditional travel companies could make the full use of website advantages and make their products and services available on the internet, there will be a win-win situation. The 2008 Olympic Game just provides such an great opportunity
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