Trip.com The Only Travel Agent To Consider When Traveling In China
When I first found myself in China early in the 2000’s and living on my own I quickly figured out that I needed a reliable means of booking hotels and flights. I had no clue what I should do. I could have used the well know travel sites that everyone used back home but there was one big glaring problem with that idea. Sure, they could reserve the hotels and flights no problem and that was fine. The trouble started when there was trouble (haha). And in China there frequently is trouble, no way to avoid it. Even when there should be no trouble they will manufacture trouble so that everything feels normal.
So in those early days, when I didn’t know my a** from a hole in the ground, I always had to rely on other people to help me get around. That was a real pain and I was always out of the loop just waiting like an idiot in the background for someone to resolve some issue or another.
That is until I found a company called Ctrip. It was like getting control back to my traveling life. Ctrip could book my flights and hotels and they had English speaking agents 24/7. Yeah the big online American agencies had English speaking agents as well but they lacked two essential things that Ctrip had. One, Ctrip is still a Chinese brand with a great deal of “guangxi” (relationships) with the hotels and domestic airlines. Two, they speak the same language as the hotel staff! Three, they understand the culture and procedures (the hotel’s in particular have many rules imposed on them by local governments and police departments that change from place to place and minute to minute)(you should have tried traveling around in-between Covid scares, my God) in China.
So, when they call the hotel on your behalf they get the respect needed to solve the problem(s). This is priceless trust me. They also never failed to call me back with an update in a timely fashion.
However, it wasn’t until 2017 when Ctrip made a bold move and acquired Trip.com, a fast growing travel agency out of Palo Alto, California with 60 million users that things got much better. This acquisition transformed Ctrip from a China travel agency into an international travel agency. Trip.com has since scaled itself into one of the largest travel agencies in the world with over 400 million uses. The site provides booking services for flights, hotels, trains, car rentals, airport transfers, tours and attraction tickets, and claims to offer more than 1.2 million hotels in 200 countries and regions, as well as over 2 million flight routes connecting more than 5,000 cities (pre-pandemic I’m sure). Train tickets for use in the UK, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Mainland China are also available for purchase on the site according to Wikipedia.
Also as a side benefit of using trip.com you can link your WeChat and Alipay accounts to which is really convenient for payments. This will also allow you to use funds that may otherwise be difficult to get out of China to pay for your travels back in your home country and worldwide.
As you can probable tell from this post these are hard learned lessons from traveling extensively in China and not just some bull to get you to try trip.com. I sincerely believe its indispensable when traveling in China and equally good outside of China as well. I invite you to use the link below to have a look for yourself.
