Originally Posted by
moondog
I was thinking about this thread when I was out tonight (can't explain why). I guess I just wanted to say that ctrip is extremely useful. In spite of the fact that I prefer hotel TAs when they're available, ctrip is only a hair less convenient (i.e. you call them, make your reservation, give money to concierge, and receipt shows up in your room ~1 hour later).
This Expedia talk perplexes me because I don't think that's a conversation we should be entertaining... at all.
Simply put, ctrip works exceptionally well and Expedia won't be able to beat its prices for at least 5 years ... i.e. the only events that would allow this to happen are: 1) WTO measure; or 2) Chinese company takes over Expedia.
In light of ctrip's market cap, #2 wouldn't surprise me.
Almost all of my travel is US domestic and on United Airlines and I book all of my travel on united.com. For better or worse, I'm used to United's website, systems and ways of doing things. In fact, I've never booked on Expedia or ctrip prior to this trip.
My perspective is perhaps very different from many who use ctrip on a regular basis. I'm a very infrequent traveler to China, this is more of a personal trip, I'm with my family of five (much less flexibility) and I'm relatively uninformed about air travel in China. Net, I'm a seasoned US traveler, but a "noob" about China.
In fact, I only found out about ctrip by browsing through these helpful forums. And, I only checked out Expedia because a flight I found on ctrip one day wasn't there the next day... For what it's worth, I found many suggestions to use ctrip or elong, I really didn't find anyone saying why it might not be best to use Expedia to book air travel within China.
As for selecting Expedia on some of the other segments, the decision wasn't really about price, but more about a few areas of convenience.
I did book some flights on ctrip and I made a dumb mistake by entering the wrong credit card expiration date... The credit card company rejected one ctrip booking, but approved another one (go figure) and I called ctrip to see what could be done. They were extremely helpful on the phone and canceled and re-booked one of the segments just so things would process correctly. The customer service and problem solving were wonderful.
Would Expedia's service be the same? Well, it's the first time using them so I don't know and I hope I don't have to find out!
Honestly, I didn't think about the potential hassles of canceled flights in China perhaps because I'm just used to United automatically taking care of the re-booking. I'll probably think twice about this issue for any future travel within China...