Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

The center has three main functions including a travel e-commerce platform at fjctsgroup.com, an offline call center hotline at 968877, and a management system for corporate travel. It is an information system for online travel searches and complaints handling for the large travel agency.

This online marketing and service system enables customers to search and book tourist products and pay for it all online, which is planned on helping netizens avoid having to visit other Chinese travel websites that merely aggregate deals like Ctrip.com or eLong.com.

This is an interesting development for the Chinese travel sector as this move basically disseminates the travel brokers/aggregaters and should provide much more cost effective services by allowing people to go direct. I suggest that the major online travel agencies will realize in 2010 that they cannot keep going down the path of cutting fees to grab share back from suppliers indefinitely. Instead, they’ll start to invest in providing additional value beyond the cheapest transaction and the “best” selection. 

I expect that we will see more widgets for price comparisons and price tracking, mobile alerts, and the such. Next year this will expand to include more content (reaching consumers higher up in the  sales“funnel”) as well as more itinerary management tools (holding customers’ hands post-transaction instead of just spitting them out of the funnel). Providing this kind of real value is the only way that they can escape competing solely on price and selection.

Source: China Tech News