appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

hooksArticlePageFloatingButtonConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

Rami Blachman

In the span of a week during Lunar New Year festival earlier this year, around 400 million Chinese went on trips primarily to unite with family members, and about 7 million of them travelled abroad, a rise of almost 10 per cent over 2018.
The China Outbound Tourism Research Institute (COTRI), an independent Beijing-based research and tourism advocacy organisation, reports that the number of outbound trips made by Chinese tourists in 2018 reached 162 million, exceeding its forecast of 154 million, a rise of more than 10 per cent over 2017.
As such, China sends more tourists abroad than any other country in the world – 120 million mainland Chinese now have passports, with as many as 30 million more being issued in 2019.
Yet China’s outbound-travel market is a complicated web of shareholdings, as players rush to cater to globe-trotting Chinese tourists.
With oceans of readily available data and fewer privacy constraints than in the West, many in the industry are betting on technology and AI applications, such as machine learning, to turn a profit from the desire of Chinese people to experience something new abroad.




Much of that flurry of activity to date has been propelled by Ctrip, the world’s largest online travel agency, which from its sprawling campus in Changning district in western Shanghai controls half of China’s online travel market.
Ctrip offers more than 60 products – including flights, accommodation, diving, skiing, cruises, high-speed rail tickets, photography, wedding planning – to its more than 300 million registered users.
The company invests heavily in an acronym it has coined, ABCD – which stands for AI (artificial intelligence), Big data, Cloud computing, and Data mining – and gleans 50 terabytes of data daily from its user base.
Meet the female CEO behind Asia’s biggest online travel company
Ctrip views AI as key to spurring smart tourism, and to stay ahead of the pack it has partnered with Chinese search giant Baidu, one of China’s AI leaders.
The companies are digging deep into data related to the interests, habits and preferences of Ctrip users with the intention of making trips and experiences more personal than ever.

Ctrip’s main challenger is Meituan Dianping, an e-commerce and food delivery platform. Perplexingly, Connecticut-based Booking Holdings has a stake in both of these archrivals are they each receive most their non-China hotel inventory from Booking.
Since 2012 Booking has invested close to US$2 billion in Ctrip but then in a surprise move it went on in late 2017 to invest US$450 million in Meituan Dianping.
Things have been further complicated by Skyscanner, a Scottish flight metasearch service acquired by Ctrip for US$1.74 billion in 2016, which faces off against Kayak, the service that Booking bought for US$1.8 billion in 2012.
Ctrip’s relationship with Booking and its suite of brands, including Priceline, Kayak, Agoda and OpenTable, has been beneficial to both companies by giving Ctrip’s users access to one of the largest international hotel portfolios in the world, while offering Booking access to the Chinese market.
The result, however, is a convoluted travel tech marketplace that has seen Booking hedge its bets by investing in two of China’s largest digital travel companies, which compete ferociously with one another, while marketing its own Booking.com and Agoda brands separately.

The big hope of digital marketing in China’s huge travel market is that by personalising trips for each of the hundreds of millions of travellers, travel tech companies can develop ever smarter algorithms and new features, growing market share.
With the ability to understand your customer and a deep pool of products on your platform, explained Jane Sun, CEO of Ctrip in a recent interview with consultancy McKinsey & Co, you can use the technology to offer a perfect match.
Sun said that “customer satisfaction, efficiency, and conversion rates all increase as a result” of a more precise match between customer and product.
China ride-hailing firm Didi mulls foray into hotel-booking business
At a conference in Tel Aviv in October, Glenn Fogel, Booking Holdings’ CEO and president, acknowledged that the success of his company hinges on its ability to recruit top artificial intelligence talent.
His visit to Israel came on the heels of the opening of Booking’s new R&D centre in Tel Aviv, which deploys dozens of AI scientists and engineers.
Under Fogel’s watch, Asia in general and China in particular, have been designated as high-priority growth areas. In China, for the first time, Booking has transformed itself from a one-size-fits-all global offering to a version fully localised to the tastes and preferences of Chinese users.
Booking upped the ante in July 2018 when it led a US$500m funding round into Didi Chuxing, China’s dominant ride-hailing service, enabling Didi’s 600 million customers to book accommodation directly through Booking’s subsidiaries Booking.com and Agoda.
So, whether it is a Shenzhen-to-Seattle flight that carries 12,000 outbound tourists a month; the new Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau bridge that attracts up to 100,000 mainland tourists on a weekend; trips to watch the northern lights at the North Pole and cruises to Antarctica – Chinese outbound tourism can be relied on to drive competition and better deployment of AI in travel tech in coming years.
Rami Blachman, founder of China Israel Innovation Accelerator (CIIA), is a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist based in Shanghai and Tel Aviv. He is a frequent speaker and writer on China cross-border tech investing and how it relates to international start-ups.


How China is seeking to transform the meaning of great power

Why US chip controls took a back seat at the Xi-Trump summit

Trade truce extension aside, was AI the real Xi-Trump summit breakthrough?

How Chinese firms can avoid a Europe-style backlash in Southeast Asia

China technology

China’s outbound tourism boom and AI are powerful drivers of travel technology and tailored trips

Chinese tourists waiting in front of Galeries Lafayette department store. Photo: Alamy

Chinese tourists take pictures of themselves standing in front of the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia, September 28, 2015. Australia and New Zealand risk losing a global arms race for big-spending Chinese holidaymakers unless they improve their services and infrastructure, jeopardizing hopes that tourism will fill the economic hole left by the commodities downturn. While both countries are enjoying record numbers of tourists from China, industry executives warn they need to improve their Chinese language skills and offer better high-end hotels and transport infrastructure. Picture taken September 28, 2015. REUTERS/David Gray

A sign for Ctrip is displayed outside the Sky Soho building, which hosts the company's headquarters, in Shanghai, China, on Monday, Jan. 23, 2017. Ctrip is the world's No. 2 online agency by market value. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

Artificial intelligence cannot replace me yet, says Esquire magazine editor

Norman Tan, editor-in-chief of Esquire Singapore. Photo: Handout

As a nod to having both a human and AI editor create the magazine, Esquire Singapore also has another firstÑtwo covers for the month of April, including a virtual robot personality, Blawko, who has over 135K followers on Instagram (@blawko22). Photo: Handout

Big boss is watching you: some UK workers constantly scrutinised by artificial intelligence

An office block in London. File photo: Bloomberg

The logo of U.S. networks giant Cisco Systems is seen at their headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris, France, April 3, 2018. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

Ankur Modi, the chief executive of Status Today. Photo: Twitter

Offices windows sit illuminated at dusk in the City of London, U.K., on Thursday, Nov. 22, 2018. Brexit Britain will be the top destination for major European investors to snap up commercial property next year, according to a survey of executives managing more than 500 billion pounds ($640 billion) of real estate conducted by Knight Frank. Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg

Google scraps artificial intelligence ‘ethics board’ days after it was formed

(FILES) In this file photo taken on October 4, 2017 Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., speaks about Google's improvements in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning at a product launch event at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, California. Google announced on June 7, 2018 it would not use artificial intelligence for weapons or to "cause or directly facilitate injury to people," as it unveiled a set of principles for these technologies. Chief executive Sundar Pichai, in a blog post outlining the company's artificial intelligence policies, noted that even though Google won't use AI for weapons, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas" including cybersecurity, training, and search and rescue. / AFP PHOTO / Elijah Nouvelage

Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James. Photo: Heritage Foundation

Google logos. Image: AFP

Tech

Companies are digging deep into data related to the interests, habits and preferences of travellers to make future trips more personalised


China’s outbound-travel market is a complicated web of shareholdings, as players rush to cater to globe-trotting Chinese tourists.


Didi Chuxing

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Technology

Apps

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

Opinion

China’s outbound tourism boom and AI are powerful drivers of travel technology and tailored trips

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Companies are digging deep into data related to the interests, habits and preferences of travellers to make future trips more personalised

Companies are digging deep into data related to the interests, habits and preferences of travellers to make future trips more personalised