Briefing: The largest travel IPO of 2012, CTrip’s loss, Qunar’s gain, and other travel tech news

August 20, 2012 By 3 Comments

JAL preps the largest travel IPO of the year,  China’s two largest online travel agencies do battle, and more items in our roundup of the stories that are making news and driving opinion on 20 August.

Japan Airlines to IPO later next month

JAL’s IPO will be the next-largest globally this year after Facebook’s, the year’s largest travel IPO, and the fourth-biggest IPO in Japan ever. In a gimmick, the world’s most profitable airline will give anyone who buys shares and hangs on to them for three years a really cheap long-distance plane ticket.

CTrip hits the skids

CTrip, which claims to be China’s largest online travel agency, saw its share price drop to its lowest in three years. Analysts downgraded the stock on news that rival Qunar, which also claims to be China’s largest OTA and is an arm of the giant Baidu.com, has decide to place wholesalers’ hotel inventory on its site.

ctrip

Inventive IT has another travel industry success

The UK software house focusing on the travel market developed a mobile website for Netflights.com and says it has several other major contracts in the pipeline. This year Inventive IT, a five-year old, 20-person company, has moved to larger offices and will continue to hire staff. 
SiteMinder adds sales staff
The online distribution company with a specialty in booking systems has expanded its 25-person London office with two senior sales appointments. The company says it’s enjoying rapid growth in Europe.

German business travelers are relatively skeptical of mobile devices

Polls of 1,000 business travelers in each of six countries — the US, the UK, China, India, Germany, and Brazil — found that German travelers carried the fewest mobile devices on average. A third of Germans say they only carry one or two devices on a trip, compared with the four or five device average among the other nationalities.

Germans were also the only one of the six nationalities where a majority of business travelers said mobile technology is overrated. The survey was commissioned by Four Points Sheraton.

NB Photo courtesy of CTrip.

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Sean O'Neill About Sean O'Neill

Sean O’Neill is a UK-based reporter for Tnooz.

Since university, he's been a full-time journalist for US consumer magazines and websites, and since 2007 he has covered B2C travel news full-time.

He lives in London and is travel tech columnist for BBC Travel. He used to work in New York City as the online senior editor for Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel.

In the past, O'Neill held editor, writer, and reporter positions at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Foreign Policy magazines in Washington, DC. Please visit his personal site and follow him on Twitter or Google+ .

Comments

  1. Alexander Maltsev says:
    September 20, 2012 at 3:56 am

    C’mon guys, Qunar is a travel metasearch, not OTA!

    Reply
  2. Sean says:
    September 20, 2012 at 4:06 am

    Thanks, Alexander,
    I was typing too fast. I regret the error.
    Thanks,
    Sean

    Reply
    • Alexander Maltsev says:
      September 20, 2012 at 4:16 am

      No worries, Sean.

      It’s very complicated here in China. Although Qunar is a metasearch in his nature, but they don’t use API to gather OTAs and airlines data, on the contrary they provide a platform (back-end and front-end), where agencies can sell tickets almost in “manual” mode. Qunar also take care of billing, mobile version and etc. Everything in his hands, so it doesn’t really look like “traditional” Western metasearch.

      Reply

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