Online family tours market in China has been in the rapid development on both mobile and PC end. Transaction value of China’s online family tourism was 6.51 billion yuan (US$1.02 billion) in 2014 and it is expected to achieve 76.2% growth to 11.47 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion) in 2015 according to iResearch.
Travel tours in China are usually categorized by travel distance as getaway trips at nearby attractions, mid- to long-distance trips, and outbound trips. By sales volume, getaway trips are the most popular. Family trips refer to travel trips by parents and children together.
Among potential family tour travelers who haven’t yet made the bookings, 55.8% prefer free and easy trips in which they don’t have to be in a group following a tour guide. 52.5% would choose long-distance domestic trips. Among those experienced family tour travelers, the ratio of following a group is higher and they prefer getaway trips.
China’s major online family tourism companies can be divided into three groups according to their themes and products:
- Separate family trips section, represented by Lvmama and Tuniu.
- Mixed family tourism section, represented by Ctrip and Alitrip where users can get the section by filtering website search results.
- Related family trips products, represented by Qunar and Utour which only have related tourism products.
The top ten cities parents and children like most are Beijing, Zhuhai, Suzhou, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan, Hefei and Hohhot. Apart from family tourism, business tourism, award tourism and mass tourism are also full of bright market prospect.
Also read: China Tourists Travel Intention Study 2015