ONLINE Travel Agent (OTA) Trip.com officially launched in the Australian market last week after a soft launch in mid-2018, with ambitions to grow its local market share.
Fresh off the stage at the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit on Thu, Lynn Qu, VP of Product & Marketing spoke with Travel Daily about the OTA’s local plans, saying “the intentions are quite simple, we want to grow.
“We want to learn more about the market and bring more product offerings, increase our brand awareness and have more Australian customers,” Qu said.
Trip.com is backed by Ctrip, a multi-billion dollar business which processes one in every four travel transactions in China and makes use of 50 terabytes of data the company analyses per day to help shape learning and product development.
Qu indicated the potential for dialogue with established retail players in the market saying “we’re open to partnerships that allow us to increase brand awareness and bring more of our products to market.
“If that’s a branded distribution partnership, we welcome that.”
“It could be a win-win partnership, particularly if they want to access Ctrip’s very large scale inventory offerings and for us we’re able to partner with a reputable local brand and allows us brand exposure, that’s great for us as well,” she said.
Qu said that at this early stage Trip.com “was not in any active conversation” with retail partners but did say she was open to “revenue share” propositions.
“Australia is hugely exciting for Trip.com and the power behind it and potential for it to grow is tremendous,” Qu opined.
Source: traveldaily