Taiwaned

We have been very loyal to Ctrip for the past 4 years.

As others have mentioned, they have superior service and when plans unravel, they are amazing at finding fixes.

However the past few days, I have been pricing all the tickets I am going to need to purchase in the next few months.

elong is easily 150-300 rmb cheaper per ticket than ctrip on the same itinerary.

It wasn't like this before. They have been fairly competitive.

If the pricing was just a few rmb difference, ctrip gets my business but in calculating the savings, its more than 2000 rmb difference. (28 segments, international and domestic)

Has anybody else noticed this?

Chinatrvl

I have said this for a long time. All travel agents have a surcharge compared to booking at the airline directly; ctrip's is in most cases the highest and between 30 and 200 CNY for domestic tickets. International tickets can be way more expensive.

I book at ctrip for two reasons:
- I don't pay for the ticket anyway, so I simply don't care and opt for the comfort
- My private itinerary is likely to be changed a couple of times and I don't want any hassle but do it with their app or quickly on the phone.

For all other trips, particularly those that are private and unlikely to change, the booking sites of MU/FM, CZ, CA are good enough and significantly cheaper.

wjv144

Being based in Shanghai results in around 90% of my flights with MU/FM. Rebooking and switching carrier was never an issue.

Recently, while changing domestic flights (2x in a row) , I've noticed that Ctrip now tries to cancel and re-book instead when changing between MU - FM

First time I managed to insist it's one airline with a lengthy discussion on the phone.
Second time there was no time to discuss, so I just accepted the cancelation fee (rmb37) and allowed the agent to book a new ticket at the same price.

It gave me the feeling that indeed Ctrip is focusing on maximizing revenue when they can.

But until your posting, I wasn't aware they also increased ticket prices.

moondog

My colleagues in Shanghai currently use Qunar as a starting point for their bookings, and they are almost always able to beat ctrip (sometimes by y30 and sometimes by y200). But, there is often some sort of mandatory travel insurance tacked on, and the companies selling the tickets are almost always really small (i.e. there is no way in hell that you can call them at 9p and expect to be rebooked on a different carrier). That having been said, if the price difference really is y350, I will consider ditching those guys.

jiejie

I'm not sure this is anything recent. Over a number of years, for every domestic trip I've compared ctrip to elong to travelzen and about 20% of the time, have found inequalities in pricing. Usually ctrip is on the high side but not always. I think sometimes it means either they haven't been as quick to post the discounts as elong and travelzen; other times they are quicker to raise prices as demand/supply balance changes for a given day or specific flight, and the other two are slower. I'm not sure there are enough data points yet to draw a conclusion, but we can all stay vigilant and use this thread to compare notes and spot any trends in pricing. Change fee/rebooking policies are a different animal and it wouldn't surprise me if all the companies are in the process of maximizing revenue from these sorts of things.

uanj

For air travel I have not seen much of a difference between elong and ctrip. qunar often has a lower price but they come back too often the next day and say sold out- fare no longer available so I have stopped using them.

I find a bigger difference on hotels among these websites. Ctrip's English site will not offer certain hotels which they have on the Chinese site stating there is a restriction that they cannot accept foreign guests. I have booked these same hotels on elong and no problem arriving foreign passport in hand. Pricing is generally though not always the same between the sites. Sometimes one site or the other has a special price so it pays to check.

jiejie

I have had good luck with elong.net on Chinese hotels. I used to use sinohotel.com a lot until elong acquired them and folded in their operations. I find they often have a bunch of cheaper and chain options that ctrip doesn't have. I've yet to encounter the No Foreigners Welcome notice.

Jiatong

-C-trip is higher than the english air china booking sute by 50-200 rmb per ticket, & if one uses a no foreign fee credit card then you also save the 3%. But i do use C-trip for the domestic in-country flights on other airlines for last minute flight service.

-The one day, (no-shopping) english guided tours can be a deal, just say NO to the add ons when on the tour.

-The Package air/hotel deals can be ok, if you pick your flights & hotels, they are cheaper on the chinese site vs the english site. But, do not expect hotel rewards or stay night credits with a ctrip hotel booking. They will give you some status benefits such as free internet at the hotel, and also 50% milage benefits with some partner airline programs such as *A depending on fare class.

Out of China, & if in Asia, i use Orbitz for hotel 'deals'

BuildingMyBento

What types of hotels generally don't permit foreigners to stay?

I've stayed in basically every type of lodging save for the "5 stars and up," only getting refused once, and that was after spending one night. Their scanner didn't work (to copy my passport), and the proprietor felt bad, so he washed shirts.

I'm not doubting their existence, as a bunch of the places I crawled into likely never had a foreigner to accommodate before, but that has made things somewhat interesting- for instance, one of the places had my name as "Passport Center," because no one knew English. Might've been Liaobu or Humen in Dongguan.

moondog

When I reviewed this thread today, it occurred to me that I don't think ctrip makes a substantial profit on airplane tickets (this is based on past conversations with its founder plus common sense). Whether they sell you a 8折 or a 4折 fare, the airline still gets to keep almost all of the money, and you get the benefits that are included in the fare purchased (e.g. the former can usually be changed once for free). Perhaps their search algorithms suck or they are simply playing conservative ball to guard against price spikes between booking and ticket issuance, but I don't believe there is any real conspiracy going on.

Taiwaned

When we booked hotels in Beijing with Ctrip, the Chinese and English sites did have different selection and price however there was some really good reasons.

We went with the Chinese site because it was cheaper but the room we got was BELOW ground and had NO windows. Not a single one. It was section of rooms that separated the laundry facility and the kitchen. All the rooms were for Chinese only.

We asked why and the desk said "Foreigners complain too much with the rooms downstairs!"

Really dark and did not have to worry about the sunlight filtering in the morning. Wouldn't ask for the room again though. It felt a tad claustrophobic.

achlee

I use the english site and for many properties it's still much cheaper than the alternatives.

uanj

The notice is on Ctrip's Chinese ipad site. I'll give you an actual example of what we found. We used an ipad accessing ctrip's Chinese site looking for the Transportation hotel (Jiaotong) next to the bus station in Turpan. The Chinese site on ipad says they do not accept foreign guests. Ctrip's English site simply does not list the hotel at all. We made the reservation through elong and had no problem with police registration though it took 30 minutes to check three of us in.

I was not saying that the hotel does not accept foreigners, only that ctrip says they don't.

And a big thank you to jieijie for inspiring us to make this trip, every part of the 8 days we were Xinjiang were a total trip! So many things I will never forget....

BuildingMyBento

The no windows to the outside-room is contagious in the mainland. Home Inns have them, and random, non-chain Chinese hotels do too. One place I stayed at in Ürümqi had one translucent window looking over another room, and another window was just a sliver of space with an orange light.

The price could be slightly less, but I'm still holding out for non-smoking rooms that don't come with ashtrays.

Chinatrvl

Since the highest surchage is, in my experience, on full fare F tickets (on some routes over 1000 CNY!) and also notable on full Y/W, I highly doubt that. Furthmore, it's also possible to compare booking classes of discounted tickets - you'll also see it's more expensive than on the airline's site.

It's a mark up or simply a fee that isn't explicitly mentioned like it is common at European online flight reservation sites.