Online travel agencies get ready for Asia

February 04, 2005 |

To make the most of the boom in the Asian travel market, major US travel web sites are offering more sophisticated online hotel booking.

To make the most of the boom in the Asian travel market, major US travel web sites are offering more sophisticated online hotel booking, discounted airline tickets and guided tours.

The Wall Street Journal reports that until recently, online booking for travel in Asia was pretty much limited to getting a hotel room in a major business city. The feeling was that anything more complicated than that was better left to a traditional travel agent. However, in the past months this trend has changed, and major travel web sites have significantly enhanced their options.

The following are some of the latest developments, according to the Wall Street Journal:

- In early January, Expedia.com roughly doubled the number of discounted hotel rooms in China available on its site, following its investment in eLong, a Chinese travel agent. While Expedia had strong hotel offerings in major business centers in Asia, recent additions reach cities that previously were difficult for Westerners who were hotel shopping. It has now put up options in cities, such as Harbin, in far northern China near the border with Russia.

- Cendant, which owns Orbitz.com, in December bought wholesaler Gullivers Travel Associates and travel web site OctopusTravel.com, which have large stocks of hotel rooms in Asia. Gullivers has focused its expansion in the past couple of years on Asia, with its most recent office openings in Chengdu, China; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Delhi, India.

- Travelocity.com has newly negotiated hotels that stray far from the region’s main business cities, to spots such as East Timor and the Kashmir region of India. New hotels include the Central Maritime Hotel-Dili in East Timor and the Intercontinental Grand Palace Hotel Srinagar, India (in Kashmir).

The Wall Street Journal notes however that travelers have long perceived these destinations as “labor intensive at best and fraught with rip-offs at worst”. In an August 2004 survey, it says, Forrester Research found that only 3.6% of US leisure travellers who buy airline tickets on the Internet plan to visit Japan by the end of summer 2005, and 5.3% plan to visit the rest of the region (including China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia). It appears that online travel agents have not to date been able to convince travellers that they can click their way through Asia as easily as destinations with which they are more familiar, such as Europe.