March 18 in the evening a rumour hits the wire that Priceline (Europe's biggest online hotel company) is looking for local help to launch a Chinese hotel booking site.March 19 in the morning a news story hits the wire that Ctrip (China's biggest online hotel company) is looking for an overseas partner to develop services for travellers to China.
Maybe each should set up a facebook profile and put the status to "random play"
photo are of centralasiatraveler
2 comments:
Priceline will not confirm these rumours but they have been doing some advertising on Qunar in the past.
Priceline are not too interested in getting more hotels inside China since they don't have the demand from their customers. For Asia, they use Agoda as a brand and their inventory includes quite a few hotels inside China.
Ctrip - well they feel the time is right to step onto the world stage. I suspect that the constant pressure on their shares to outperform means they have to expand at a very fast pace. Their pattern has been to work with overseas partners for international product and then when they build enough volume, start contracting hotels directly. They did that in HKG, Thailand and Singapore so no reason they cannot continue with Europe and US once there is enough demand from China. For inbound, I heard they just launched a revamped English site.
great comments - thanks Roy
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