The CEO of Chinese travel giant Trip.com has pointed to strong pent-up demand among Chinese tourists as evidence that the regional and global travel industry is poised for recovery in 2022.
Speaking at Trip.com’s 2021 Global Partner Summit in Macau on Thursday – which included the signing of an agreement to further promote travel to Macau – Jane Sun said the group’s performance over the past year showed positive growth trends that reflected a desire among Chinese citizens to resume travel as border restrictions begin to ease.
Those trends included double-digit growth in domestic hotel bookings and air ticket bookings in mainland China in 2Q21 compared with the same period in 2019. Sun also noted that global domestic hotel bookings on Trip.com had increased by over 160% in 3Q21 compared to 3Q19, while cross-border air ticket bookings in Europe saw an increase of 200% in 3Q21 compared to the previous quarter.
However, she was particularly bullish on Macau, which she said has “great potential in the tourism market.”
“Macau has very good facilities,” she said. “For example, we are currently at Sands … if you put an IR like this in Shanghai, it would be full 360 days a year.”
Sun added that Macau was under-utilized as a venue for MICE events, which is an area the city should focus on in future.
“Macau is famous as a gaming city in China, but Trip.com wants to help Macau to develop MICE,” she said. “Macau has many good facilities for MICE. It should be like the US, where many meetings are organized in Las Vegas, because this city has very good facilities.”
The platform revealed that under the first year of an official partnership between Trip.com and the Macao Government Tourism Office, Macau travel bookings on Trip.com Group platforms increased by 244% year-on-year in the first half of 2021. Keyword searches for “Macau” grew 216% year-on-year.
Speakers at 2021 Global Partner Summit included MGTO Director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes and Sands China COO Grant Chum.
