Hilton will open a  new Hilton Doubletree in  Beijing in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The hotel will have 547 guest rooms including 110 suites. Public facilities include two restaurants, a lounge, a number of meeting rooms, a ballroom, and a health club and swimming pool.

Doubletree by Hilton Beijing is located at the South West 2nd Ring Road, just 38 kilometers from the airport, next to the Central Official District of Beijing (COD) and Beijing’s Financial Street and with easy access to major tour attractions like the Beijing Century Monument, Tian’an men Square, Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven.

In China CTrip.com has the business travel business well under control. Think Orbitz or Expedia except for the fact that CTRP is effectively a monopoly. Bear Stearns estimates that the company holds a 57% market share of the Chinese online travel market and it has been growing.

The company’s future growth prospects remain bright because the online travel market itself in China is expected to grow at a 37% rate through 2010.

However, there is still the problem of the reluctance of the Chinese to use credit cards for booking on the Internet. And, in truth, China is just getting used to the idea of online travel booking. So the prospects for long term gorwth are pleasing.

Look at it another way. Bear Stearns estimates that the company only accounted for 2.7% of total hotel bookings in 2005, and 4% of total airline tickets in 2006. Take a medium term view abd by 2010 those figures will be around the 10% mark with plenty of room for growth.

Yes, the are other players in the market by at the moment it is CTrip right out there in front. This in the context of a robustly growing overall industry. Some of the major airlines have created their own online offering platforms, but at this point they have not been able to reach critical mass in order to effectively compete against CTRP. Nor, in truth is that likely for it takes a while for airlines to build up the infrastructure regarding total packages that are needed.

Citigroup notes that after Q2, management guided analysts to model 35% growth for Q3 but instead delivered 55% growth.

A look at industry trends shows that while hotel bookings are a strong cash flow driver for the company (and this business is expected to continue to grow), the primary growth engines will likely revolve around air ticketing and packaged tours. CTRP looks set on a winner.
Source: Seeking Alpha

Launched in Beijing’s Chinese Ethnic Culture Park last week was China travel’s newest search tool — www.china.directory.travel.

Aimed at promoting China’s depth of tourism assets, the new China Directory is a progression of the online search tool the .travel Directory — a virtual catalog of every travel product and service offered by .travel registrants. Plainly the web site is still being worked on as not all its functions are operating totally smoothly but there is more than enough there to see how it will work.

The China travel portal currently offers information with more than 7,000 destinations and travel-related companies in China. Unveiled last week in Chinese, www.china.directory.travel will soon be available to consumers and businesses around the world in 11 different languages.

Mr. Tang Hongguang, Director-General of the Information Center of the China National Tourism Association (CNTA) said, ‘The .travel directory comes to China at an advantageous time. With the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games nearing, China is focused on preparing for the millions of visitors expected from around the world.

‘Currently, the total number of trips taken domestically is up to 1.39 billion while 125 million foreign travelers have entered China. wwwchina.directory.travel will not only help to further promote the country’s abundant tourism assets to the millions of travelers China hosts annually, and the many more anticipated for the Olympic Games, but provide greater access to travel information about China to consumers around the globe.’
Source: Internet Travel News