The Hong Kong China International Tourism Investment Corporation's plan to build a Mangowebsite and operate it in 2006 aroused great attention from experts in China's online tourism operation during the 2005 China International Travel Mart held in Kunming, capital of the South China's Yunnan Province, according to Xinhua website.

The corporation is the only tourism business of the 53 large-scale state-owned enterprises directly under the leadership of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC).

Insiders believe that China's online tourism operations have "great potentials, but are small in scale", showing that the current customer service center is still a major bottleneck for the development of online tourism in the country.

According to authoritative statistics, online hotel reservations valued merely 510 million yuan last year and the number is expected to reach 1.8 billion yuan in three years. The market share of China's e-tourism only occupied less than 1 per cent of the total tourism market in China. This does not reflect China's position as the world's big nation of tourism with one of the largest numbers of Internet users in the world.

The online hotel reservation service in the United States reached 52 billion US dollars last year. The market share mades 23 per cent of the total tourism market and is expected to grow rapidly to 119 billion USD in a short period of time, said Wu Zhiwen, president of Mango Website.

In the light of China's current situation, it is still early to fully realize online tourism reservations. First of all, a comprehensive customer service center needs to be set up in China, said Wu Zhiwen.

Most tourism reservation still needs to be done by customer service centers at the initial stage of online tourism reservation period in China.

With the continuous improvement of websites and the increase of Internet users, online service be as full-fledged as face-to-face service. Impetus will also come from diversified methods of payment, including online payment settlement, as well as enhancement of consumers' confidence on e-commerce. Online reservations will be a trend in the tourism consumption in the future for the country.

By People's Daily Online