Ctrip.com International highlighted the importance of South East Asia and the potential of the region to become a hotspot for China’s rapidly growing outbound travel market, at the 10th Annual ITB Asia trade show in Singapore, yesterday.

During the 2017 October Golden Week, 46 percent of the 6 million Chinese outbound travellers chose South East Asia as their holiday destination, a trend driven in part by more simplified visa application process for Chinese citizens. As more countries open up for Chinese travellers, passport ownership ratio remains relatively low in China. Although this is only at 7 percent, the company expects this amount to rise in the near future.

According to Ctrip’s data for flights and hotel bookings, the most popular destinations in South East Asia were Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, all of which have seen growth from our tracking since 2015. China’s domestic market is also growing in line with travellers’ spending power. First-tier cities such as Shanghai and Beijing are seeing the average traveller spending well over 1400 USD per head.

Overall, China’s outbound travellers are expected to reach the 200 million mark in 2020, up from 122 million in 2016.

To meet the needs of both domestic and outbound travellers, Ctrip’s strengths in AI, big data and intelligent hardware are crucial advantages in providing a superior travel experience. Whether through VR technology that allows users to select their hotel rooms online, check-in via facial recognition technology, or features such as “Smart Home” and “Smart Keys”, Ctrip customers enjoy an unprecedented level of customization and convenience throughout their travels.

Ctrip leverages the 50TB of data generated daily by 300 million users to analyse and understand demographics, customer demands and travel behavior. As the first OTA to use machine learning to forecast travel trends, Ctrip’s has the capacity to study the buying behaviour of our customers on both Ctrip and third-party platforms. Intelligent computing allows our customers to enjoy continual service improvements, personalized recommendations and an overall optimization of travel resources.

Ctrip’s chief executive officer Jane Sun said, “The development of advanced technology has always been one of Ctrip’s core advantages in the travel industry. We will continue to harness technological innovation to provide the highest-quality travel related services to meet our customers’ rapidly evolving needs.”