Study of online tourism in China and the United States

With the emerging mobile-internet and prosperous progress of e-commerce, online tourism has taken on a tremendous business prospect owing to its extraordinary growing speed. According to purchasing process of the online... [ view full abstract ]

With the emerging mobile-internet and prosperous progress of e-commerce, online tourism has taken on a tremendous business prospect owing to its extraordinary growing speed. According to purchasing process of the online tourists，this paper makes a definition and a classification of online tourism industry. Relying on the financial data of China and U.S.A top online Tourism corporation，this paper selects leading enterprises of several segments of the online tourism industry as the research object，and uses the SCP(Structure—Conduct—Performance) paradigm of the Industry Economics perspective to compare the differences of China and U.S.A online tourism enterprises，in order to point out the developing trend of Chinese online tourism industry.

We select top 5 enterprises (China:C-trip,Qunur,eLong,Tuniu,Home Inn; America:Priceline,Expedia,Yelp,Tripadvisor,Kayak) in both two countries to find differences between them.Those financial statements are mainly from U.S.A listed companies’ financial statement in 2013 published by US Securities and Exchange Commission. Through the analysis, we can conclude that: the online tourism industry of China needs more development in terms of product structure, business model, and the credit system, only in this way, can we gradually close the gap between our country and the developed countries. The future developing trend of online travel of China would be as follows：1）Online travel penetration will be gradually improved, and online travel will be developed synthetically toward SML.2）With the intensification of enterprise integration, online travel market will increasingly concentrate.3)One or two market leaders will appear in UGC (User Generated Content) market segments .