Ctrip (NASDAQ: CTRP) and Qunar (NASDAQ: QUNR) are two dominant OTAs in China, which merged in Q4 2015.
Ctrip and Qunar reported total GMV of CNY 152 billion (USD 24 billion) and CNY 83 billion (USD 13 billion) respectively. By the end of 2014, Ctrip had 49% of the total market share wh`ereas second-place Qunar had 27%, per iResearch. However, putting Ctrip and Qunar in the context of overall travel market in China, they are taking less than 5% and 3% share and therefore there is ample room for both to take share from offline players in the long term. (Source: “China internet – a tale of two travel sites” by Macquarie Group)
There are quite a few niche players in China OTA market.
Tuniu (NASDAQ: TOUR) is the No. 1 packaged tour platform with over 1.1 million SKUs, covering over 140 countries worldwide and all the popular tourist attractions in China. HNA Tourism Group invested Tuniu USD 500 million at November 2015.
Ly.com is one of the biggest tourist attraction ticketing platforms in China, now its new strategy is outbound travel service and tourism financing. Wanda Group invested ly.com USD 577 million at summer of 2015. The second biggest shareholder of ly.com is Ctrip.
HNA Tourism Group invests US$78 million (RMB500 million) in housing rental site for travelers Zhubaijia.com and share its 30 million customers base with the website – which is similar in scope to Airbnb – and is aiming to turn the platform into the most popular housing rental site for Chinese travelers
Chinese OTAs know how to attract Chinese tourists, they know how to handle them but they don’t know how to properly handle the destination.
