Comparing Some New Chinese Travel Websites

Written by Luyi Chen on August 15, 2007
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Written by Chen Yanqing

Chinese travel sitesTravel website Ctrip.com is a big success in the web 1.0 era in China. Part of the reason is good monetizing strategy. Part of the reason is the need in traveling has increased dramatically in China over the past 15 years. Now that we are coming to web 2.0 era, there’s no surprise in my mind that some new travel websites will come up. Now I’m going to compare some new travel sites including Yododo, mipang, tuniu and cn0km.

Yododo team has the most complete feature set in this list. They have features like travel plan, travel partners, destination guide, cheap ticket booking, useful travel QnA, traveler forums. Yododo also has some social network features like traveler space where users can post their trip photo albums, trip journal and foot print. There’s no google ads on its page and it seems to me that they are using the same proven monetizing strategy as Ctrip by pulling more consumers to the local business and getting some payment from the local business. [Ed: Mobinode has interviewed Yododo last year.]

Mipang is the most “web 2.0” like website in this list. It has a nice and clean UI with a good user experience. One feature they really want to emphasis is Social Network. People write their travel stories, share photos about their city and places they have visited. Users also can organise their photos or search for interested photos by tags. The search feature in this site is too simple and not very useful. You will not get a result by search anything other than the destination name. mipang uses google ads as their monetizing method. [Ed: Mipang was first rolled out as a 43places clone. In June, it relaunched with focus on travel blogs.]

Tuniu has the biggest user base and page views among the websites in this list. It has some web 2.0 features like “pingpan”, a digg like feature, where users can write and vote stories. But overall tuniu is like an old school travel portal. There’s too many information on the homepage. tuniu uses a combination of ads and tickets sell as their main monetizing method.

cn0km.com is different from other sites because it is based on wiki. Users can collaborate on the pages of every travel destination city. The UI though is not very user friendly and is not well maintained. cn0km uses google ads to get money.

Overall, None of these websites seems really impressive. They are still far behind Ctrip on user base. I think adding more innovative ideas like personalized travel plan similar to what Yahoo Travel and TripHub did may help them gaining ground in the online traveling market.

10 Responses to “Comparing Some New Chinese Travel Websites”

  1. sandralee on August 15th, 2007 9:11 pm

    Would you like to see whether the trip planner and some interesting features on the site of http://www.17zou.com is useful? Will be glad to hear any feedback. Thanks.

  2. John Pope on August 16th, 2007 12:19 am

    Thank you for mentioning TripHub (http://www.triphub.com). We work hard to innovate and add new, useful functionality all the time. And we welcome your feedback!

    John Pope
    VP Marketing
    TripHub Inc.

  3. Zheng Gaozhao on August 16th, 2007 2:13 am

    Thank you for reviewing mipang.com. I am looking forward to contact you directly. And we also have some more cooler features… eg.mipang games( http://www.mipang.com/games/ ) and create map( http://www.mipang.com/map/2289.806.htm ) :)

  4. Comparison of new Chinese web 2.0 travel sites | China travel industry blog on August 17th, 2007 3:25 pm

    [...] Comparing Some New Chinese Travel Websites : China Web2.0 Review Travel website Ctrip.com is a big success in the web 1.0 era in China. Part of the reason is good monetizing strategy. Part of the reason is the need in traveling has increased dramatically in China over the past 15 years. Now that we are coming to web 2.0 era, there’s no surprise in my mind that some new travel websites will come up. Now I’m going to compare some new travel sites including Yododo, mipang, tuniu and cn0km. [...]

  5. Michael Bu on August 21st, 2007 12:36 am

    Thanks for reviewing Yododo.com. Yododo is currently working hard on improving the overall user experience to provide the best social networking platform for its members to easily find suitable fellow travelers during their next trip. Yododo’s goal is to help them work out the trip plan together and at the same time have access to carefully selected service providers. Any feedback would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

  6. 言多益善» Blog 存档 » links for 2007-08-18 on August 21st, 2007 10:40 am

    [...] Comparing Some New Chinese Travel Websites : China Web2.0 Review [...]

  7. zhengyi on December 3rd, 2007 10:06 am

    good!
    i’m one of 0km’s words editer,hope to see more comments from you.

  8. bootee on April 2nd, 2008 1:07 pm

    I really like this travel community website called 世外游园网。It has the best travelguide and blogs and articles about traveling abroad for Chinese. Look here http:\\www.tripgarden.com .

  9. Ian Ford on June 6th, 2008 12:52 pm

    How about an article (or series of articles) on smaller websites like ours which is specific to Yangshuo and the Guilin area only.

  10. GetYourGuide Blog – News & Development » Archive » Learnings from the Chinese travel market (so far) on August 19th, 2008 3:31 pm

    [...] a social touch. China Web 2.0 Review compared a few travel 2.0 websites last year and it seems that there is still huge potential for travel websites with a social touch [...]

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