Corporate tours excite travel players

Chinese travel agencies are excited about the future of customized corporate travel that involves trips for team building, conferences, exhibitions and business exploration.

Some travel firms are already earning billions of yuan in revenue by offering such niche services.

For instance, Ctrip said its revenue from the niche segment reached 1 billion yuan ($159 million) last year. It is expected to grow fourfold this year.

“Customized business tours have a huge potential, and it won’t be long before this segment occupies half of the overall customized tour market,” said Xu Zhiyun, CEO of Ctrip’s customized tour business, at a news conference.

The segment itself is expected to see collective sales of more than 1 trillion yuan in the coming years, according to Xing Xiaoliang, an analyst with market consultancy Analysys.

Different from leisure tours, customized company tours have diverse goals, said Song Xuan, deputy general manager of CYTS Sparkle Tour (Beijing) Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China CYTS Tours.

Agencies in this segment offer much more than mere travel route planning, and hotel and flight ticket bookings. They help in organizing themed activities, channeling local companies that clients want to meet, Song said.

Wei Xiao’an, chief analyst of the World Tourism Cities Federation, said a tailor-made corporate trip could have 10 to 1,000 travelers. Such trips are sought mostly by private-sector companies. Typically, overseas destinations are popular.

“Only big agencies with lots of resources and experience in designing tours can handle such demands,” Wei said.

China has around 28,000 travel agencies. Major ones among them include China CYTS Tours, Caissa International Travel Service, Ctrip and Tuniu. All of them offer customized corporate travel services, according to Xing.

He said charges for such services are relatively high due to extra costs related to designing customized routes and providing other services.

CYTS generally charges 10 to 15 percent of total payment as service fee when planning such a trip, according to Song.

Travel expenses could range from 1,000 to 2,000 yuan per person to more than 100,000 yuan per person, or more if the travelers are at the level of board of directors, he said.

As State-owned enterprises have clamped down on extravagance that could result in corruption, demand from SOEs for such trips has declined in the last five years, Song said.

However, customized corporate trips were worth over 2 billion yuan last year, he said.

“Business travel is closely related to financial performance of a company,” he said. “If it doesn’t perform well, these tours will be the first to be cut from the cost list. Anyway, I’m still positive about the future.”

That confidence may be coming from CYTS’ strategy to provide integrated marketing solutions to clients besides ordinary travel services.

For example, CYTS will help some clients to organize forums or conferences, including theme design, guest invitations, advertisements and indoor decoration. “We are selling services, not just tour-

PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY Tianjin-based Tiens Group’s staff take a selfie in Nice, France, during a custom-designed company tour.