HereisChina.com launches online customization services

BEIJING, China – HereisChina.com, a professional marketplace to meet more than 2,000 professional inbound tour operators and experts throughout China, announced today the launch of customized trips th

BEIJING, China – HereisChina.com, a professional marketplace to meet more than 2,000 professional inbound tour operators and experts throughout China, announced today the launch of customized trips through their online portal.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) has revealed that during the Olympics, more than 30,000 media delegates representing major press outlets from all over the world will arrive to cover the games and the real China behind them. At the same time, a total of half a million inbound tourists will arrive in Beijing to watch the games and explore China. The hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games will trigger a new wave of interest in China travel around the world. The World Travel Organization has stated that by 2015, China will become the world’s biggest travel destination country with its annual inbound tourists reaching 200 million.

So how will such a big number of inbound tourists organize their travels? The answer is, online booking via the Internet. Statistics show that in the European and American countries where the internet has reached the average family, up to 60 percent of tourists use the internet to search and book their trips. This figure will continue to rise as the younger generation grows up in the internet era, which has been called the information age.

However, searching for tour packages in China is a confusing process for people who wish to come to China. Simply typing “China tour” into Google yields too many options, and it’s difficult to tell which services are the best. When people attempt to find China-based tour operators to save on budget, they often find that the tour operators’ websites are poorly designed and provide slow response times. These China-based websites also provide insufficient information.

Foreign sites like Expedia.com, one of the leading online platforms for worldwide tours based in the United States, currently only lists a few overpriced China tours on their website. They actually anticipate that they’ll be able to find an online marketplace or platform of China tours based in China.

People can easily get lost or confused, and they often are uninformed about what they should do and what they should avoid. What people searching for China tours need is a way to refine and filter their search, a way to customize their tour packages.

“They will be happy if they discover HereisChina.com,” said Robert Zhang, the founder of HereisChina.com, “We are just the right marketplace they are looking for. On our platform, we integrate thousands of different China tour products at difference budgets, and in different themes. Hundreds of professional China-based tour operators have joined HereisChina.com and uploaded their tours into the marketplace.”

With just a few weeks to go before the Beijing Olympics, Robert, with his ambitious startup team, recently launched the brand new site. Besides China tour packages, HereisChina.com also offers total customization of your China tour. If you are planning a tailor-made China tour, simply visit the homepage of http://www.hereischina.com/ and submit an online trip request. Within 24 hours, up to 3 tour operators will respond by email with a proposal and quotation. In this way, you can find the tour operator that works best for you. The responses normally start within 12 hours for clients in North America.

As Robert described, the technical development team is also adding some new functions to the platform, such as an interactive travel review sharing system, travel blogs and forum, etc. HereisChina.com is also planning to launch a content campaign to motivate those who have traveled in China to contribute their travel reviews and travelogues, so that future users can use these reviews to help them make a decision when comparing tour itineraries and destinations. The more users that the site attracts, the more powerful it will become.

About the author

Avatar of Linda Hohnholz

Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

Share to...