Following the theme of "Wisdom Tourism Year" closely this year, the wisdom tourism services are emerging, such as online services for domestic tourism, online marketing, booking and payment. Newcomers of online tourism endowed with "pure genes" of the Internet business since their establishment begins to sensibly and rapidly seize these "fresh fruits".

Compared to Ctrip which started from air ticket & hotel business and now has become a leader in online tourism, Qunar gains its revenue from ads on the search platform to a larger extent, while Tuniu is engaged in selling online package tour products previously ignored by various key travel agencies. The more segmented market constantly draws forth listed companies to agitate the industry pattern.

Ctrip ropes in "newcomers" everywhere

Before this situation, there was a "gossip" about cooperation among all parties.

In February this year, it was told that Alibaba was going to invest in Ctrip, ambitious to rank No. 1 in online tourism at one stroke; however, neither party gave any responses correspondingly. In April this year, rumor has it that Baidu acted as a go-between for the merging of Qunar and Ctrip, and would invest in Ctrip to gain the leader status in online tourism. Afterwards, CEOs of Ctrip and Qunar respectively replied that they would hold the dominant power, except direct admission or denial of the merging rumor.

As an old stager of online tourism, eLong announced on April 16 that exclusive advantageous resources would be provided by eLong and Tongcheng to each other. This was regarded as a united resistance against Ctrip. After that, Ctrip announced its investment cooperation with Tongcheng. At the same time, before the listing of Tuniu, Ctrip became a shareholder instantly. As shown in the Financial Report for the 3^rd Quarter of 2014 released by Tuniu, its net revenue achieved a quarter-on-quarter growth of up to 85.6%.

Wei Changren the General Manager of Jinlv Consulting (www.ctcnn.com) said that, the domestic leisure tourism market scale exceeded 400 billion at present, however, the penetration rate of online tourism enterprises was only about 10%, leaving a large space to develop in the future.

Every industrial giant wants a share of the online tourism business

In addition to Ctrip which sees online tourism as promising, other industrial giants also want a share of this "cake".

The world's largest online tourism group Priceline announced to become a shareholder of Ctrip in August this year. Alibaba launched a brand new tourism brand "Alitrip - let's go", announcing to take up the online tourism business. The 16-year old business trip dealer TEMPUS purchased shares from the 5-year old CNCN.com.

As anticipated by iResearch, the growth of online tourism market revenue from 2014 to 2017 will maintain at over 20%, far more than the growth of this entire industry. As for industry development, journalists of the Beijing News recently interviewed the high-level leaders of online newcomers Tuniu and Qunar.

As said by Yu Dunde the Founder of Tuniu, China's entire online tourism development mainly passed through two major stages: the first stage started from 1996 and ended in 2006, during which air ticket & hotel booking services were transferred from offline to online mode, with a relatively high penetration rate reached; the second stage started from 2006 till now, during which the leisure tourism was transferred from offline to online mode and still under preliminary development.

Peng Xiaomei the Chief Operation Officer of Qunar said that, there was a huge potential for online tourism at present, however, a true winner hadn't shown up in such a big market.