Qunar forms alliance with Ctrip

Two of the country's largest tourism websites, Ctrip.com International and its former rival Qunar.com Inc, began cooperation over the weekend in a bid to jointly strengthen their online tourism businesses and compete with other market players.

Qunar's website has begun promoting tourism products offered by Ctrip - including a five-day trip to Hangzhou - as "one type of the cooperation measures between the two companies," Niu Yue, a public relations staffer at Ctrip, told the Global Times Sunday.

"The cooperation between the two companies only focuses on vacation products, but online ticket and hotel booking are not included so far," Jiang Yun, public relations manager at Qunar, told the Global Times Sunday.

Qunar is the country's first travel information search engine, offering services that compare prices and features for domestic flights and hotels.

Ctrip, one of the leading domestic online travel service providers, "would like to cooperate with any companies that can offer search engine services about tourism information," Ctrip said in a statement e-mailed to the Global Times.

Cooperation between the two websites came as a surprise to both the media and the public, as the two companies once had a fiercely competitive relationship and have even confronted each other in court.

In June 2011, Qunar accused Ctrip of deceiving consumers and of malicious business practices. It also sued Ctrip for defamation in May 2012.

This kind of business warfare went on for five years, leading up to the present cooperation, which an analyst said is a strategy to allow the two companies to compete with other fast-developing market players such as Alibaba Group and eLong Inc.

"In business, there is no permanent friend or enemy, but only profit," Yan Xiaojia, a senior Internet analyst from Internet consultancy Analysys International, told the Global Times Sunday.

Etao, a leading domestic shopping search engine under Alibaba, announced this July that it would launch an online travel search service, which Yan said was in "direct competition with Qunar."

ELong, another online travel site that has always been a rival of Ctrip, also has a strong business partner in Tencent Holdings, a well-known Internet company with diverse services including social networks, Web portals, e-commerce and multiplayer online games. Tencent invested $84.4 million in a 16 percent stake of eLong in May 2011.

"Ctrip has to find a partner to combine travel planning and booking services with search engine services, and Qunar is a good choice," Yan said.

"Travel search engine services could bring more network traffic to Ctrip," the tourism website said in its statement.

The online travel booking business has witnessed quick development in China. In the second quarter of this year alone, the transaction value for online booking hit 50.9 billion yuan ($8.3 billion), up 29 percent year-on-year, according to a recent report from Internet research firm iResearch.