Trip.com Group Limited provides a global one-stop travel service that integrates a comprehensive suite of travel products and services and differentiated travel content.
Leveraging the company’s one-stop-shop model, high-quality service, and advanced technology, the company is consistently expanding its global reach. The company is the go-to destination for travelers in Asia, and increasingly for travelers around the world, to explore travel, get inspired, make informed and cost-effective trave...
Trip.com Group Limited provides a global one-stop travel service that integrates a comprehensive suite of travel products and services and differentiated travel content.
Leveraging the company’s one-stop-shop model, high-quality service, and advanced technology, the company is consistently expanding its global reach. The company is the go-to destination for travelers in Asia, and increasingly for travelers around the world, to explore travel, get inspired, make informed and cost-effective travel bookings, enjoy hassle-free on-the-go support, and share travel experiences.
The company operates under a portfolio of brands, including Ctrip, a leading provider of travel and related services in China, Qunar, a leading online travel agency in China, Trip.com, an online travel agency for global travelers, and Skyscanner, a leading global travel search company.
Platform
The company’s one-stop travel platform connects its users and its ecosystem partners. Leveraging its AI capabilities and travel insights accumulated over the past years, the company has evolved from an emerging online travel transaction platform to a one-stop travel platform integrating a comprehensive suite of travel products and services, differentiated travel content, and connecting users and ecosystem partners from around the world. The company’s platform aggregates its product and service offerings, reviews, and other content shared by its users based on their real travel experiences, as well as original content from its ecosystem partners, to enable leisure and business travelers to have easy access to enjoyable travel experiences and make informed and cost-effective bookings.
As a result of the company’s leading position in travel markets and its vast user base, its platform has attracted ecosystem partners across multiple sectors, including accommodation reservation, transportation ticketing, packaged tours, and in-destination activities. The company provides its ecosystem partners with a variety of technology-enabled solutions and helps them establish an online presence, access its massive and global user base, and engage with users in real-time. In addition, since 2018, the company has been rolling out content-sharing features on its platform, which allow users to discover, explore, and share travel-related content featuring destination reviews, travel experiences, and tips, thereby further enriching the ecosystem surrounding its platform.
Omni-Channel Touchpoints for Users
The company is committed to providing each user with a personalized, convenient, enjoyable, and inspirational travel experience. This philosophy has enabled the company to become the go-to destination for travelers in Asia and to steadily increase its influence in target markets around the world. In particular, the Asia-Pacific region is among the fastest-growing regions for travel consumption globally, driven by a rapid shift from offline to online and mobile services. The company’s omni-channel approach is a natural fit for this paradigm shift and has enabled it to accomplish strong growth momentum in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere.
Online Channels: The company’s online channels consist of its mobile applications, other mobile access channels, and websites. The company’s online reservation and fulfillment infrastructure enables its users to explore, search, reserve, and purchase travel products and other value-added services through its online channels. For the year ended December 31, 2024, over 90% of the company’s total transaction orders were executed through its mobile channels. The company’s Trip.com app has become one of the most downloaded online travel agent (OTA) apps in many markets, such as South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The company also maintains localized websites across the world. It maintains its main PRC site of Ctrip through its subsidiaries and Ctrip Commerce (VIE). Qunar also maintains its main PRC site of Qunar through its subsidiaries and Qunar Beijing (VIE). As of December 31, 2024, the company’s products and services through Trip.com were available in 24 languages, 35 local currencies, and 40 local sites, and its products and services through Skyscanner were available in 35 languages and over 50 countries and regions globally.
The company offers personalized home pages based on user profiles or past transactions and displays travel products and services based on geolocation that are available to it in compliance with the applicable laws and other travel insights. While placing an order, users are prompted with options to customize their trips with packaged deals or additional value-added services for their convenience, such as travel insurance, car rental, or hotel deals. All products and services are shown with full price transparency. The company’s itinerary management tools enable users to review and manage their orders and itineraries. The company encourages users to submit ratings, reviews, and recommendations to its platforms during their trips and after they return from their trips. Leveraging the company’s content-sharing feature, users are inspired by new travel ideas, make informed travel decisions, and share their travel experiences in an engaging community.
Offline Channels: In addition to the company’s nine customer service centers and 16 call centers located around the world, the company has offline stores with its business partners to serve its users who prefer an in-person experience. In the company’s offline stores, it provides users with one-stop services, such as travel consultation services and other local support and assistance. In 2024, the company streamlined and optimized its offline stores to strengthen its competitive advantage over online channels. As of December 31, 2024, the company had approximately 6,000 offline stores across approximately 300 cities in China.
User-Centric Approach: The company’s users are at the center of its business philosophy and operations. Since the company’s inception, it has constantly focused on building trust with its users and creating a more personalized, convenient, enjoyable, and inspirational travel experience. The company provides a broad spectrum of travel products and services that accompany its users throughout their entire journey, from idea inspiration, trip research and planning, to informed decision-making, travel booking, in-destination activities, on-the-journey support, and post-travel sharing of travel experiences. The company consistently refines its product interfaces to enable an increasingly frictionless booking experience for its users, with full transparency in pricing, terms, and value-added services. The company extends good care for its users by providing 24/7 user support all along their trips.
Open Platform for Ecosystem Partners
The company adopted an open platform business model to attract and facilitate customized travel offerings by ecosystem partners covering various sectors in the travel vertical. The company’s open platform strategy allows ecosystem partners to join its open platform and directly post their own product and service offerings on its platform alongside products and services that are negotiated with business partners and offered by the company.
The company’s ecosystem partner base includes hotels and other accommodation providers, airlines and other air ticket partners, train ticket partners, car rental companies, bus operators, ferry carriers, other travel agencies from which it sources travel products and services, and value-added service partners. The company also opened up its platform to international partners, search engines, e-commerce platforms, and other channels to expand their business opportunities and increase the offerings available to its users. As of December 31, 2024, the company’s open platform provided approximately 1.5 million global accommodation listings, offered flights from over 640 airlines, and had a network of over 65,000 other ecosystem partners. With the company’s global user base, it is well-positioned to forge partnerships with various participants in the global travel ecosystem and expand its global presence.
The company carries out an ecosystem partner selection process to ensure the quality of product and service offerings to its users. When determining whether to accept a prospective ecosystem partner onto its open platform, it takes into account various factors, including reputation, industry expertise and know-how, price competitiveness, and track record of delivering high-quality products and services. The company has also streamlined the contracting process for ecosystem partners by using an e-contract system on its open platform. It sets high service standards and manages the product and service quality of the company’s ecosystem partners through screening and ratings. The company monitors its ecosystem partners’ performance based on user feedback. Ecosystem partners with good performance will be rewarded, while those with negative reviews will be flagged for improvement.
Products and Services
The company offers accommodation reservation, transportation ticketing, packaged tours, and corporate travel management services, as well as other travel-related services to meet the various booking and traveling needs of both leisure and business travelers through its travel platform. The company began offering accommodation reservation and transportation ticketing services.
The company has been driving the transformation of travel experience and the adoption of online and mobile-based travel booking solutions for leisure and business travelers. It captures evolving user preferences and provides travel content, as well as travel products and services, to make travel effortlessly enjoyable. In addition, the company offers various other products and services, including packaged-tour and in-destination activity products and services, corporate travel management services, and other travel-related services, such as car services, travel-related financing and insurance, and visa services to meet the various booking and traveling needs of both leisure and business travelers. Its users also have access to both user-generated and professionally-generated content through personalized content feeds and its search tools.
Accommodation Reservation
Users can search, compare, and book accommodations on the company’s platforms based on their destination and detailed stay preferences, and may further filter and sort search results by price range, star category, location, brand, and amenities. The company also augments its accommodation reservation offerings with traveler ratings, reviews, recommendations, and tour guides.
The company acts as an agent in substantially all of its hotel-related transactions. The company generates substantially all of its accommodation reservation revenue through commissions from its hotel reservation partners through its platform. It recognizes revenues when the reservation becomes non-cancelable, which is the point considered when the company completes its performance obligation in accommodation reservation services.
The company contracts with hotel partners for rooms under two agency models, the ‘guaranteed allotment’ model and the ‘on-request’ model. Under the ‘guaranteed allotment’ model, a hotel guarantees the company a specified number of available rooms every day, allowing the company to provide instant confirmations on such rooms to its users before notifying the hotel.
Transportation Ticketing
Users can search and book transportation tickets via the company’s online platform and customer service centers. The company’s search functions allow users to narrow search results by specifying preferences, such as time and mode of transportation, and the company leverages its data analytics capability to help them book tickets that best suit their travel needs. As of December 31, 2024, the company’s transportation ticketing network covered over 220 countries and regions.
Air Tickets
The company sells air tickets as an agent for substantially all PRC airlines and major international airlines operating flights. As of December 31, 2024, the company offered flights from over 640 global airlines, covering over 3,400 airports in over 220 countries and regions. The company’s air ticket booking engines source real-time availability and pricing information from ‘direct connects’ to airlines’ booking systems and the global distribution system, a computerized network system that has real-time links to its ecosystem partners’ inventory.
In addition to selling air tickets, the company also offers various options and services to help users travel with ease. Powered by the company’s route planning algorithms and travel supply, users can customize their trips by combining two or more of the company’s core travel products, such as air tickets and hotels, which are typically offered at a package price. The company also provides travel insurance products, such as flight delay insurance, air accident insurance, and baggage loss coverage, and various ancillary value-added services built around users’ air travel needs, such as air-ticket delivery, online check-in and seat selection, express security screening, real-time flight status tracker, and airport VIP lounge services.
Other Tickets
Other tickets covered by the company’s transportation ticketing service include train, long-distance bus, and ferry tickets. In connection with such ticketing services, the company also offers various other ancillary travel products and services that are designed to streamline the ticketing process.
Packaged Tours and In-Destination Activities
The company offers independent leisure travelers bundled packaged-tour products, as well as in-destination activity products and services, catering to its users’ evolving demands.
Packaged Tours
The company offers its users a wide range of bundled packaged-tour products on its platform provided by its ecosystem partners, including group tours, semi-group tours, customized tours, and packaged tours with different transportation arrangements, such as by air, cruise, bus, and car rental, covering domestic and international destinations. For example, the company focuses on securing diverse boutique travel products domestically, such as combinations of themed hotels and dining. The company provides integrated transportation and accommodation services and offers a variety of value-added services, including transportation at destinations, attraction tickets, local activities, insurance, visa services, and tour guides. The company also provides high-quality user support, supplier management, and customer relationship management services to packaged-tour providers.
In-Destination Activities
Destinations are often defined by the activities available upon arrival. Over the years, users have been seeking more novel experiences and are eager to do more memorable activities in the destinations. Driven by the rise of experiential travel, the company offers a variety of in-destination products and services, such as in-destination dining and shopping, day tours of popular tourist destinations, attraction and show tickets, customized tour guide services, and virtual tour assistant. Users not only have plenty of options for what and when to book in-destination activities, but also can book at the last minute in a quick and straightforward manner on its platform. As of December 31, 2024, the company offered over 300,000 in-destination activities around the world. As the needs of the market further evolve, the company is enriching its offerings of in-destination products and services to further expand its business.
Corporate Travel Management
In addition to serving individual users, the company also serves corporate clients with similar products and services to help them plan business travel in a cost-efficient way. Among the approximately 1,000,000 corporate clients the company has served, there are over 300 Fortune 500 companies and over 180 Top 500 Chinese Enterprises.
The company provides its corporate clients with business visits, incentive trips, meetings and conferences, travel data collection and analysis, and industry benchmarking. The company has been upgrading and iterating its corporate travel management system and rolled out Travel Management 5.0, which is an online platform integrating information management, online booking, online authorization, online inquiry, and travel reporting systems. Riding the waves of artificial intelligence and digitalization, the company is building an ‘Employee + Digitalization + AI’-centric service matrix. Furthermore, the company is establishing a digital intelligence solution, designed to be customizable, flexible, expandable, iterative, and fusible. This solution will be available to the company’s customers, partners, and business travelers.
At the same time, the company has reached collaborative agreements with several partners and is in the process of implementing strategic agreements to gradually enhance the company’s global all-in-one solution.
Other Travel-Related Services
The company’s other travel-related services primarily include online advertising and financial services. The company provides marketing planning and travel media services to its ecosystem partners, as well as a wide range of advertising services to pan-industry brand partners. Based on the company’s travel product and service offerings, user base, and industry value chain, the company has also obtained necessary licenses to facilitate users and ecosystem partners on its platform with its financial services, which mainly cover consumer financing, and a range of digital solutions for its users and ecosystem partners.
Content Offerings
The company consolidates and aggregates travel-related content for its users to help them get inspired by new travel ideas, make informed travel decisions, and share their travel experiences. The company’s users have free access, through personalized content feeds and its search tools, to both user-generated content shared by travelers based on their real travel experiences and professionally-generated content, including its official selections and content produced by professional travel bloggers, KOLs, and the company’s ecosystem partners.
Reviews: The company provides its users with detailed, authentic, and transparent information on its product and service offerings based on its users’ in-depth reviews and detailed ratings. The company has been refining its user review framework to improve authenticity, objectivity, and relevance of its review and rating system, creating a feedback loop for the company to refine its products and services, enhance users’ search experience, and enable them to rely on the company for making well-informed travel decisions.
Community: The company’s community integrates the online travel content-sharing features on its platform with its product and service offerings, so that its users can discover, explore, and share travel-related content, such as destination travel experiences and tips. In addition, leveraging the company’s AI technology and travel insights, it is able to push tailored recommendations to its users while they are browsing through its community.
Selections and Recommendations: The company provides its users with various lists of selected and recommended product and service offerings, such as popular destinations, themed activities, restaurant guides, and special deals. The company’s selections and recommendations help inspire its users’ next great getaway, from long weekend escapes to must-see destinations and to bucket-list adventures from around the globe.
Live Streaming: In March 2020, the company launched its first mobile BOSS live streaming event featuring a live tour by its management team and Trip.com live streaming series. Since then, the company has upgraded its live streaming channel into a platform with integrated resources and content. In addition to its official channel, the company’s live streaming platform also hosts professionally-generated content contributed by professional travel bloggers, KOLs, and its ecosystem partners. The company has collaborated with leading international hotel brands to offer its users discounts on luxury hotels through live streaming. The company’s live streaming has also showcased destinations around the world with featured international travel products, attracting millions of views by its users. The company has diversified its live streaming distribution channels by collaborating with leading live streaming platforms.
User Support
The company provides user support online and offline through multiple channels, such as calls, instant messaging, email, and social networks, in multiple media formats, such as voice, text, image, and video, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company is committed to maintaining high service standards worldwide. As of December 31, 2024, the company had nine customer service centers located around the world, including in Shanghai, Nantong, Guangzhou, Manila, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Seoul, and Edinburgh. These customer service centers are staffed with in-house travel specialists who have participated in a formal training program before commencing work. The company’s workforce includes thousands of travel professionals across 28 countries. The company also provides comprehensive aftersales services, including aftersales support, pre-travel warnings, major incident compensation, a special situation refund policy, and emergency support, among others. All of these efforts have resulted in consistently improving customer service quality and a global customer satisfaction rate of nearly 90%.
In China, the company has been a standard setter for user support in the travel industry. In 2016, the company launched the first travel safety center in the region. The service center established seven mechanisms to provide travelers with more protection, including the application of the global supplier travel safety standards, travel warning centers, a global travel destination emergency assistance mechanism, major disaster protection funds, a special reason cancellation policy, global travel insurance and rescue services, and a tour guide responsibility mechanism. The company provides its users with travel insurance services, including insurance consultation and claim settlements, from delayed and canceled trips to accidental injury treatment, through one of its subsidiaries with an insurance license. In 2017, the company launched the first global travel SOS service in the region. Users who book a trip from the company’s platforms have access to 24/7 emergency support. The SOS service currently covers three major categories: support in emergencies, such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, support in case of injury or illness during the journey, including assistance in medical treatment, delivery of medicines, and translation services, and assistance provided when valuables are lost during the journey, including assistance in the recovery of lost property and eventually bringing the property back to the home country.
As the company consistently expands its global reach, Trip.com has also been recognized for exceptional quality of service. At the 2024 International Customer Relations Excellence Awards presented by the Asia Pacific Customer Service Consortium, Trip.com was recognized as both Contact Center of the Year and Global Support Services of the Year. Trip.com has also been awarded as Asia’s leading online travel agency in 2024 at the World Travel Awards. These recognitions underscore the company’s commitment to putting customers first, offering 24/7 global support and service to international travelers at every stage of their journey.
Technology
Since the company’s inception, it has been able to support the growth in its online and offline traffic and transactions with its technology and infrastructure. The company’s IT infrastructure is able to support nearly every aspect of its business, including its travel platform, mobile and website operations, and customer service centers.
Technology-Empowered Platform
The company’s technology platform is empowered by AI and other proprietary technologies. The company’s platform processes a massive amount of travel-related data. The company leverages various technologies, such as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, and conversational AI, to inform various applications, such as traffic forecasting, civil aviation big data analysis, flight delay prediction, a tourism knowledge graph, and especially, improved customer services to its global user base, among others. The application of the technologies benefits not only its users, but also its ecosystem partners.
For the company’s users, its technologies enable personalized recommendations, a streamlined user experience, enhanced user engagement, and the sharing and viewing of user-generated content. The company uses both public and private cloud technologies to optimize operational efficiency. Some of the core technologies underlying the company’s user support include CtripIM, an instant messenger system developed in-house, which offers a streamlined problem-solving process, Softswitch, which enables the company to securely encrypt users’ displayed phone numbers to prevent leakage of sensitive user information, SoftPBX, a telephone system software that distributes calls through the intranet to different operators after the user’s phone call is connected. These technologies enable the company to handle user requests more efficiently, support its users in times of traffic spikes, enhance system stability, and ensure consistent availability to its users, WenDao/TripGenie, a big-data-driven, intelligent travel assistant that provides users with questions and answers related to itinerary planning, information gathering, and others, and TripBest, a ranking system for products in traveling destinations, which comprehensively evaluates factors, such as user reviews, sales, and popularity to provide users with the best product recommendations.
For the ecosystem partners, the company’s technologies enable marketing and optimize operating efficiency based on traveler preference and accurate demand predictions. The company offers a variety of solutions to its ecosystem partners, such as an e-booking system for accommodation partners, which provides standardized information input to accommodation partners to digitalize their offerings, and a pricing error monitoring system for airfare, which detects flight tickets with abnormally low fares (bug fares) using anomaly detection models based on massive historical and real-time airfare data.
Proprietary Search and Transaction Engines
The company applies proprietary technologies in flight ticket search and accommodation search and transactions, which help it attract and retain users and improve their experiences on its platform. These technologies are able to process data that covers the global product offerings available on its platform, use optimized algorithms to reduce computational cost, shorten search latency and processing time, and generate relevant results swiftly to ensure a good user experience.
The company’s technologies for flight ticket searches include a search engine and personalized recommendation system. These technologies can support hundreds of millions of queries per day. The technology currently has covered departure or arrival cities worldwide and accommodates various languages. The company has also built intelligent tools and machine learning technologies for ecosystem partners to strengthen their competitive positions. The company provides deep integration of travel information technology systems with online transaction platforms, which further decreases airlines’ operating costs and maximizes revenue.
The company’s technologies for accommodation searches include a hotel matching system and model algorithms. These technologies can support billions of queries per day, with an industry-leading average response time. They can also rapidly process tens of billions of data points needed to calculate numerous room types, room status data, and room price data incrementally updated every day. The technology connects hotel sales sites in countries and regions around the world and supports multiple currencies and all major international credit card payments. As a result of the technology applied in accommodation search, the company is able to attract and retain users and improve their overall experiences.
Marketing and Brand Awareness
Through a combination of online and offline marketing, brand promotion, cross-marketing, and rewards programs, the company has created strong brands associated with travel products and services and user support. In addition, the company leverages word-of-mouth referrals among users to promote its brands.
Brand Advertising
The company operates through four leading travel brands, namely Ctrip, a leading provider of travel and related services in China; Qunar, a leading online travel agency in China; Trip.com, an online travel agency for global travelers; and Skyscanner, a leading global travel search company.
The company conducts its brand campaigns through advertising on video streaming platforms, targeted liquid-crystal displays in public spaces, and billboards at airports, railway stations, and bus stations. The company also works with celebrities in its marketing campaigns and embeds its brand and travel products into live TV shows, movies, and other entertainment marketing channels.
Performance Advertising
The company has contracted with the majority of the leading online marketing channels, such as search engines, browsers, and navigation websites, to prominently feature its websites and has cooperated with online companies to promote its services, as well as conducting public relations activities. The company has purchased related keywords or directory links to direct potential users to its websites.
The company has also worked with major internet portals and leading mobile applications in their respective sectors to advertise locally and has worked with top smartphone manufacturers to increase the number of its app downloads and promote more activations and transactions.
Cross-Marketing
The company has entered into cross-marketing arrangements with major PRC domestic airlines, hotel chains, financial institutions, telecommunications service providers, e-commerce and internet companies, and other corporations. For example, the company’s airline partners and financial institution partners recommend its products and services to members of their mileage programs or bank card holders.
Rewards Program
To secure the company’s users’ loyalty and further promote its brand, the company provides its users with a rewards program. This program allows the company’s users to accumulate membership points calculated according to the services purchased by the users. The company’s users may redeem these points for discounted future bookings or gifts.
Seasonality
In China, as of December 31, 2024, the third quarter (year ended December 31, 2024) of each year generally contributes the highest portion of the company’s annual net revenues, primarily due to the strong demand for both leisure and business travel activities during the summer. These seasonality trends are difficult to discern in its historical results because its revenues have grown substantially since inception.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had over 1,600 patents registered with the PRC Intellectual Property Administration, including over 650 invention patents, and it had over 1,100 pending patent applications in China.
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned over 1,750 registered trademarks and approximately 200 pending trademark applications in various categories with the Trademark Office of the PRC Intellectual Property Administration. In addition, the company had over 200 registered trademarks in various jurisdictions outside of China. The company has registered its major trademarks ‘Ctrip’ (simplified Chinese characters for Ctrip), ‘Trip.com,’ and ‘Trip.com Group’ in various countries and regions.
As of December 31, 2024, the company held over 1,400 computer software copyrights and over 250 other copyrights registered with the PRC Copyright Administration.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had over 300 registered domain names in China, including ctrip.com, and approximately 30 registered domain names outside China, including trip.com, all of which have been registered with www.markmonitor.com, and the company has full legal rights over these domain names. As of December 31, 2024, all of the company’s registered domain names were in effect.
Customers
The company has a broad base of customers, which primarily consist of its ecosystem partners, including airlines and other air ticket partners, hotel and alternative accommodation partners, and various value-added travel products and services partners, such as insurance companies. The company has cultivated and maintained good relationships with its ecosystem partners since its inception. The company has a team of employees dedicated to enhancing its relationship with existing ecosystem partners and developing relationships with prospective ecosystem partners. The company’s customers also include, but are not limited to, users who purchase travel products that the company sources from ecosystem partners, users who purchase ancillary value-added travel products and services, and advertisers who post advertisements of their products and services on its online platforms.
Government Regulations
As advised by Commerce & Finance Law Offices, the company’s PRC legal counsel, due to the fact that its ADSs have been listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and its ordinary shares have been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the company is deemed as an ‘Existing Issuer’ pursuant to the Overseas Offering and Listing Measures and the implementation guidance and is not required to complete the filing procedures with the China Securities Regulatory Commission, or the CSRC for its historical securities offering.
The company’s operations in the United Kingdom are also subject to increasing regulatory obligations, such as the Online Safety Act and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.
History
The company was founded in 1999. The company was incorporated in 2000. It was formerly known as Ctrip.com International, Ltd. and changed its name Trip.com Group Limited in 2019.
