Skift Take
More Chinese travelers than ever before are traveling to the U.S. and Alitrip is looking to provide custom, mobile-booked itineraries through its relationship with North American hotels, airlines and tour operators. It helps that its parent company is the preeminent Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, giving them near-unlimited resources to compete in a crowded Chinese travel market.
Chinese travel to the U.S. is set to skyrocket, due to more lenient visa regulations and increased spending from a growing Chinese middle-class that is excited to visit America.
Alibaba Group's travel division Alitrip looked to attract partnerships from U.S. tour operators, destinations and travel service providers at a conference Monday in Los Angeles espousing the business opportunity of increased Chinese travel to the U.S.
More than five million Chinese travelers will visit the U.S. in the year 2020, up from 2.6 million in 2015, according to U.S. Travel Association CEO Roger Dow, who spoke at the event.
Sherri Wu, Alitrip's chief strategy officer, said that building partnerships with industry giants like Marriott International, Starwood Hotels and Resorts and InterContinental Hotels Group has let the company capitalize on the increasing number of Chinese travelers looking to travel to the U.S. A deal with AmericanTours International, a major domestic tour operator in the U.S., was inked at the conference.
Alitrip, which officially launched in October 2013 after being rebranded from Taobao Travel, is looking to position itself as a one-stop-shop for the Chinese traveler who wants more control over each segment of their vacation. By the end of 2015, the company reported working with more than 10,000 industry partners and having served about 100 million Chinese travelers.
Skift spoke to Wu about the dynamics in the Chinese online travel market, the challenges that Chinese travelers face when visiting the U.S. and why Alitrip's marketplace model is valuable for American travel companies.
Skift: When people consider the Chinese travel market, Qunar and Ctrip are usually thought of as the most important players. How has Alitrip tried to become relevant in the Chinese market despite entering just over a year ago?
Wu: Even though we're the young kid on the block, I will admit we're very lucky to have Alibaba as a family because sometimes my feeling is we're a start up. But we're a start up that doesn't worry about where the paycheck is coming from, where the resources are coming from and everything. We naturally have 400 million users in our system already. For everyone else, you have to buy that traffic. That's why I think th
