“Covid slowed us down but we will continue growth trajectory in Asia,” says James Liang
THE pandemic has not derailed Trip.com Group’s mission to be the leading international travel brand in Asia by 2022 and the leading international travel brand in the world by 2025 – a goal it shared during its 20th anniversary in 2019 – it has merely slowed it down.
Speaking at last week’s WiT Homecoming conference via video from Boston, co-founder and executive chairman James Liang, said, “We are not cutting back during the pandemic. We didn’t have a lot of opportunity to invest during Covid, but unlike our competitors who have extensively cut back their investments, we’re staying put and keeping our team intact.
“We will resume our expansion and investments very quickly when Asia starts to recover. Covid slowed us down a bit, but we’ll continue this growth trajectory in Asia.”
Liang, who was in Boston as part of a four-month long trip, laughingly said that he could be representative of what is being termed as “revenge travel” – Chinese travellers making longer trips to make up for lost travel time during the height of the pandemic – although he is for sure ahead of the curve.
The question is when will Chinese travellers return en masse to destinations in Asia and beyond? He predicted “three to six months”.
That of course depends on countries agreeing to recognise Covid-19 vaccines, apart from those in their national vaccination programmes and vaccines under WHO’s emergency use, including those from China. He stressed it is essential that all vaccines are recognised as proof for entry for full tourism recovery to happen.
As to when China will open to international tourists, Liang said “it’s just a matter of time.”
He believes that if countries in Asia are prepared to live with the Covid virus and treat it like the flu, like some Western countries are doing, then the region’s opening could be imminent.
“Probably in one or two months, we’ll see new rich small countries in Asia (citing Singapore as an example) with high vaccination rates starting to reopen. In three to four months when most Asian countries, including Thailand, Korea and Japan, start to open up, then China will feel the pressure to open soon.”
He is also optimistic that the move to hybrid work by companies will have a positive impact on travel. In August this year Trip.com Group launched its “2021 Hybrid Work Trial”, a six-month programme (August 9 to January 30, 2022) in which its employees will work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays.
He described this initative as “a huge thing as the last time the work schedule changed from a 50-hour week to 40 hours was probably 80 years, 100 years ago. There hasn’t been such a big change since then, but the pandemic really accelerated this change.”
This flexibility in work will have a positive impact on the travel industry, with more people having more time for vacations and changing the way they take holidays, he added.
And as travel takes off, Trip.com Group will resume its expansion including investments. Asked if this could mean “revenge investments”, Liang said, “Yes, it depends on how fast we can recover. Signs in Asia are encouraging. Recently, thanks to Singapore opening up to international tourists, despite having a number of infected cases, we saw a tremendous increase in searches for hotels and flights coming out of Singapore.”
There may not be many bookings yet, but the trend is encouraging, he said. “When we see recovery like this, we will definitely speed up our investments.”
Improvements in the works at Skyscanner and Trip.com
In November 2016, Ctrip (now Trip.com) acquired UK flight search company Skyscanner for US$1.74 billion, the company’s first move into global meta-search territory.
To Liang, the best thing about the investment is that “Skyscanner is still the leading flight metasearch in the world, and has the largest share of metasearch in Europe with intra-Europe traffic now fully recovered. It gives us the opportunity to quickly introduce Trip.com’s brands to our European customers, and it accelerates our product development and our relationship with our European allies.”
On what could be improved with Skyscanner, he cited its hotel search product. “I think we could have made a quicker investment in building the meta hotel search product in Skyscanner.”
For Trip.com, there are three areas it is working on to improve.
One, international flights: “We will continue to enhance the flight product especially the international flight product that was slowed down by the pandemic.”
Two, to build up its app. “I think we have the best app certainly in China and the features are the richest; so we will continue to leverage that and replicate trends across different countries.”
Three, customer service. “Our advantage is in service. We have built several contact centres around the world, in Japan, in Korea. We always put our customer experience first. We are very generous in investing personnel and technology in providing the most responsive and high quality service to our customers, so that needs to be replicated to international markets.”
Overall, Liang said the group could have started to develop its international non-Chinese market sooner. “We started about two or three years ago but we could have started earlier, so we’re kind of late to come outside of China. We’re in catch up mode now. It takes a long time to do it, we have to be patient to grow our market presence and grow our technology product steadily.”
• Watch full interview here.
• Featured image: WiT’s Yeoh Siew Hoon in conversation with Trip.com Group’s James Liang
