China’s Ctrip tour agency plans Scottish call center

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Chinese online travel agency Ctrip is reportedly planning to open a call center in Edinburgh, in its first such move out of its home market.

With Ctrip aiming to recruit around 200 English-speakers in the Scottish city over the next few years, the new center would complement the company’s much larger pool of thousands of people staffing its call centers in China, according to Chinese business media Caixin.

Ctrip's new Edinburgh call center will operate separately to Skyscanner /Scotsman.com Photo

Ctrip is the dominant player in the Chinese travel market, and is aggressively expanding home and abroad as domestic demand for travel plateaus after booming growth. It already owns Edinburgh-based Skyscanner, after swooping for the travel search firm in December.

However, it is thought the new call center will operate separately from Skyscanner.

"[The Edinburgh call center is] very small and pretty immaterial in terms of investment," a person with direct knowledge of the situation told Caixin. "It’s something being tested over the long term to be able to better service Ctrip’s customer base. The large majority of Ctrip’s customer base is outbound tourism anyhow."

Screen shoot of Ctrip.com

The number of outbound trips from China rose five percent in the first half of 2017 from a year ago to about 62 million, showed a recent report by the China Tourism Academy and Ctrip. This is certainly encouraging growth, but slower than in recent years.

Ctrip has consolidated its position as China’s leading online travel agency over the last two years by taking over or buying major stakes in rivals including Qunar and eLong.

It also formed an equity alliance with US travel giant Priceline in 2014, but the pair have been low-key on that partnership since then. Ctrip also made headlines when it announced it would buy Skyscanner for 1.9 billion US dollars, in its biggest overseas purchase to date.

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