Alibaba Group Holding wants a bigger slice of China’s booming online-tourism market.To battle for dominance in the fast-growing online-travel market, Alibaba will rebrand its Taobao Travel division as an individual unit called Alitrip. The new site has more than 10,000 merchants for airlines, hotels and package tours, including carrier Cathay Pacific and popular hotel-booking website Agoda.com. Alitrip will also offer visa- application and tour-guide services, Alibaba said in a press release today.
Alibaba is taking a crack at a marketplace long dominated by the Nasdaq-listed Ctrip. Ctrip, which makes most of its profit from hotel-room and flight sales, accounts for 54.1% of this market that grew by 17.1% to 61.41 billion yuan ($10.04 billion) during the April-June period. Consultancy iResearch estimates that the market size will reach 75.5 billion yuan ($ 12.35 billion) in 2016.
Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba Group (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Alibaba has been investing in the online-travel space. In September, it spent about $ 457 million to buy a 15% stake in Beijing Shiji Information Technology, which provides technology and software services to hotels. Last year, it invested undisclosed amounts in travel website Qyer.com as well as online travelogue service 117go.com.
