China's Online Travel Industry

The China Web2.0 Review blog recently covered several new Chinese travel sites, comparing them to some of the more popular US travel sites.

Comparing Some New Chinese Travel Websites

The author of that blog post concludes that "Overall, None of these websites seems really impressive. They are still far behind Ctrip on user base. I think adding more innovative ideas like personalized travel plan similar to what Yahoo Travel and TripHub did may help them gaining ground in the online traveling market."

I have an article in this month's (Oct 2007) issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Unfortunately, my article (titled "China's Growing Wanderlust"), cannot be seen without a paid subscription. One of the topics that I cover in that article is the state of online travel in China. A few points that I make are:

1. Although online travel bookings in China grew 72 percent in 2006 to over 2.75 million bookings, valued at 1.54 billion yuan (US$204 million), it pales in comparison to the US, where the online travel market generated revenues of US$83 billion in 2006.
2. Chinese consumers have been wary of both online transactions and the use of credit cards (both on- and off-line).
   
3. Chinese travel agents discourage online bookings because they pay higher credit card fees online (1.0%) compared to in person (0.1%). So the approach to online travel in China is to direct the public to call centers for information and bookings, and to travel agency offices for cash transaction.
   
4. Successful online travel agencies in China negotiate special travel packages at favorable prices that are attractive to the middle and upper classes, who are also more willing to use credit cards and pay a little more for the convenience of online travel bookings.
   
5. The biggest online travel agency, by far, in China is Ctrip.com, which accounted for 54.2% of online sales in 2006, followed by eLong.com with 17.8 percent of the market. Expedia.com owns 52 percent of eLong.com, but also has its own China website this year.
   

Although struggling now, many expect China's online travel market to explode in the coming years as more people enter the middle class and the use of plastic (credit cards) becomes more widespread. -- With trends like that, no wonder that the Shanghai stock market is booming these days!

(This blog entry was originally posted on my Web 2.0 Travel blog. - Alan)

The world is smaller than you think!

Social networking sites and the web 2.0 are growing massively. Several projects, from Facebook to MySpace are drawing more and more people in. I just recently signed up for facebook myself, to become a member of a network that was set up in there as an organzing tool for a real life network at Uni. But will we really use it, I am not sure. Despite their popularity no one really seem to be quite sure yet, whether facebook and myspace will transform social organization or honestly are just a huge waste of time.
This is totally different, from my perspective, in a specific set of servises, in which the rationale for networking is to allow the members to benefit from mutual hospitality across a web-based global community. It is highly intresting to assess Web 2.0 relevance to travel.
Signing up in Couch-Surfing or Hospitality Club, the two main providers in this field will avail you with 1000s of open invitations to stay as people’s guests, free of charge, on a couch or sofa, in a guest room or at least camp in the garden. I became acquainted with the systems last year and used it extensively recently on a trip through California. I have to say, I am a fan!
I met very friendly people in San Franzisko, Santa Barbara and in LA, they not only took me in but also showed me around, offering their insights into the local restaurant szene and bars as much as their lives.
Looking at it with a bit more perspective it quickly becomes obvious how intresting the issues is for travel and tourism studies. Hospitality Club (HC) is the older version, dating back to 2000 and has by now over 300.000 members in all continenets. Couch-Surfing (CS) started bit later, but quickly grew to over 250.000 today. These numbers don’t seem significant when compared to general tourism statistics. Yet there groth rates are amazing and there is not an end in sight. How does it function?
I entered HC first, last summer and then tried in on a short trip to Bratislava. I contacted a few people as offered in the list and got feedback from one member. She said her housemate wouldn't want to allow her to have people stay this time, but she was willing to show me around in Bratislava. Happily I accepted and we met and she showed me around, giving me insights into the town and her take on the cities situation that I would have missed without HC.

What makes the voluntary exchange intresting to tourism studies is the challenge is poses to the hospitality industry. As one user puts it: “"Who wants to sit in a lonely hotel?" Staying in annoynous and expensive housing is not necessarily convinient. Moreover it seems that despite calls for "post-tourism" and its claim that all tourists today relate with some ironic distance to the world of travel, HC and CS show that people still invest heavily into the idea of authentic travel experience and are actively looking for alternatives to commodified tourist scapes.
Moreover the extensive community and networking functions that the web provided are themselves restructuring the social realities of travel. Communities from in these sites are not remaining virutal, but realized themselves in festivals and camping events, organized in several places and of different geographical scope. A CS member from Leeds recently invited me to a Leeds members meeting in Hydepark in my neighborhood. And so through the help of a global networking page I might end up making friends just blocks away from my house.

Research should be undertaken into these sites and their communities as they are actively transforming the way travel works. I will keep my eyes open and hope that I see you soon on HC and CS.

Blogging About Tourism and Travel

Thanks to Fabian for adding me as a contributor to the N.E.T. I have several other tourism-related blogs and will post items related to the goals of N.E.T. here, as well. This first item is a bit peripheral to the new economics of tourism, but I think it would still be of interest to N.E.T. readers... Cheers, Alan
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I recently sent out a question to some 1000 or so tourism academics (professors, lecturers, graduate students, and other researchers) on email discussion lists, asking them "Do You Blog?" The purpose was to see how blogging is used by tourism academics. A summary of my findings can be found here:

http://tourismplace.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-dont-we-blog-university-faculty.html

The major categories or types of blogs that people told me about include:

• Blogging about Tourism
• Blogging for Classes and Students
• Research (and) Blogs
• Personal Travel Blogs
• Podcast Blogs
• Email Lists as Blogs

For a full summary and links to those who responded to my query, click on the link above. Here, I am going to cover the more general topic of blogging about travel and tourism.

In my informal survey, above, I found a handful of people who are doing things in each of the areas that I listed. However, even though blogging has been around for about a decade, the higher education arena seems to be taking it up only now. Travel blogs, on the other hand, have been popular with the general traveling public for several years now. That is actually how I got started blogging -- by being encouraged by my daughter to keep a travel blog of a particularly interesting trip that I took June 2005.

Travel blogs have become incredibly popular because people like to talk about their trips. In addition, because they are in the public arena (on the Internet), they also provides an ever growing opportunity for tourism researchers. In my summary above, there were more people using blogs for research purposes than anything else -- including five research papers that I know of that have been (or will soon be) submitted for publication in academic journals.

There are a lot of travel blogging websites available. I, personally, use Blogger.com (aka blogspot.com; owned by Google.com) for almost all my blogging, simply because they can all be accessed from one "dashboard." However, by doing so I am not getting the many other features that specialized trip diary blog sites provide -- such as easy photo and video uploads, trip mapping, and social networking. Some of these specialized travel blogs include:

1. VCarious.com
2. TripConnect.com (formerly TripMates.com)
3. WAYN.com
4. Travelpod.com
5. MyLifeOfTravel.com
6. 43Places.com
7. TripConnect.com

Click on each of these to read a mini review that I have written of them over the past year.

In addition to these "consumer" travel blogging sites, there are other blogs that are more professional, travel industry, and destination marketing oriented. A few examples of these are:

• PinoyTravelBlog.com – A Filipino Guide to the Philippines
• Gadling.com – Professional Travel Writers - collaborative blog
• Roads Less Traveled - by Scott Ahlsmith of The Travel Institute
• VagaBlond - Collaborative Travel Blog about “Fashionable Travel”
• Geeky Traveller – A Travel Blog for Nerds
  
• Written Road – Tips for Travel Writing
  
• Up In The Air - about Tourism and Climate Change by the Icarus Foundation
  
• Carbon Neutral Tourism
  

So there is a lot out there. Blogs are a one of the oldest and most fundamental parts of the long-tail economy, the attention economy, and the social/new media economy. To talk and teach about the new economics of tourism requires an understanding of the blogosphere. And I think that the best way to do that is to read blogs and to write blogs!

Note: You can subscribe to blogs and read them as you would an online newspaper by using an RSS agregators, such as Google Reader or Rojo.com (two that I have used), or Bloglines.com (very popular).