02:50 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Interesting interview from the NY Times
Here a little summary:
Q. How big is the travel market in China?
A.
According to China Travel Bureau statistics, in 2007 it was $150
billion, spent by Chinese on travel domestically and on inbound travel
by foreigners. The World Tourism Organization forecast says China will
become the largest inbound and outbound tourist country by 2020.
Q. Why are you going after the English-speaking market, and what services are you offering it?
A.
Currently 90 percent of our revenue is from domestic travelers, Chinese
people traveling within China, for leisure and business. And 10 percent
is from Chinese people traveling to other countries. There is one new
market we are trying to target, the inbound business, to attract people
in the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea and other countries to come
to China.
The first step we are taking is to launch our English
Web site. If you need a hotel, we have more than 6,400 hotels in China
to offer. If you need to fly to any cities, Ctrip has 100 percent
coverage on all the routes. If you’re on a business trip and want to do
a side tour on the weekend, we can take you out. We’ve just launched
rental cars with a driver.
[...]
Q. What are your company’s main challenges now?
A.
The main thing is to continuously explore new business lines. How can
we test the water and get into the cruise industry, which we don’t have
in China? The rental car business? China’s not ready for it, the
traffic is very bad. All these things will take lots of wisdom, in
terms of how much we want to invest, what is the right time to invest.
In China, we’re very strong in the first-tier cities. How can we fully
penetrate into other areas? And after China, what are we going to do?
We have Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Southeast Asia, India — these all
represent very good opportunities. As Chinese citizens become more
affluent, we need to best utilize all our customer resources and send
them to the area that they want us to take them to.
04:52 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Here some good articles I've found on the net about the good benefits of adding a pr campaign to promote a small business in the adventure tourism industry.
The most common ways to start create buzz and on-line traffic is to focus on Public Relations and Bloggers.
These 2 means have much power because can give the opportunity to
get Google rankings indirectly (More buzz = more links = better
rankings).
Blogger are good sneezers too. Popular blog have a good number of subscribers that could help spread the word exponentially.
I you can conquest a big blogger attention with a good following,
its subscribers could help you too. Each subscriber has its own
following and so on…
For those of You looking for real example of these strategies, please have a look here:
Health + Travel = Cycling
Adventure Travel For Autistic People
07:18 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
The first thing to consider when starting new adventure travel activities business is to plan and analyze what the market says and test all you do.
- Analyze you customers:
- What do they need and search for?
- How they search for info about?
- What's the trend?
- How many are they?
- Can you find a specific niche or target for a specific audience?
- Start a pay per click campaign to see how much potential traffic there is
- Analyze the competition:
- How many websites are there in the market?
- How many years are they online?
- What are the first 5 results in Google is a search for my core keyword?
- What's their advertising effort?
- Analyze your internal resources:
- Have I the right human resources?
- Have I the right knowledge?
- What do I need to improve my knowledge about the market?
- How much money do I need?
- Plan and organize your time and resources:
- Do a list of possible contents that could interest your audience
- Build your website
- Choose a brandable domain name
- Develop a great Logo
- Have a good design and clear navigation
- Be sure it's Search engine friendly
- Do a mailing list of possible contacts (bloggers, webmaster, journalist, etc...)
- Use a good statistics program to monitor your website and its performance:
- Top pages
- Traffic sources
- Time users pass on your site
- Click trough rate in important pages
- Test, Test and...test!
- Analyze that data of the period of 6 months to:
- Define better you core niche
- See what contents users like
- How much strong your competitors are
- Financial sustainability
Hope this is helpful...stay tuned, more news and tips next weeks.
