CEO Interview: Ctrip’s Strategic Threat to Expedia, Priceline and Everyone Else
Photo Credit: Ctrip CEO Jane Sun has global ambitions but it's mostly to accommodate Chinese travelers, wherever they wander. Ctrip
Skift Take
To a great extent, Ctrip is going to be preoccupied for years chasing Chinese travelers and servicing their every travel need, around the globe. Barring further consolidation, Ctrip isn't much of a threat to its partner, the Priceline Group, which is years ahead in its own hotel business and is executing superbly.
If you want to understand the nature of Ctrip's global ambitions and strategy, just let the CEO take you on a guided tour of China's largest online travel agency, and the globe's second largest by market cap, as she scrolls through screens on her phone.
Jane Jie Sun, who got promoted from Ctrip co-president to CEO in November, sits in a conference room on a late Tuesday afternoon a couple of weeks ago in a heavily Chinese section of Flushing, Queens in New York City.
Sun, currently the only female CEO of a publicly traded online travel agency, landed in New York from China only a couple of hours earlier but she's eager to talk to Skift about where Ctrip is headed. (Gillian Tans is CEO of Booking.com, the biggest piece of the Priceline Group.)
Asked to discuss Ctrip's business model and seemingly all-encompassing array of products, including everything from flights and hotels to luggage, translation and extraction services, Sun takes out her mobile device and points to what see
