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Paul Bischoff · · 2 min read

China’s Qunar sold 250,000 air tickets in one day for Chinese New Year

china train cny smartphone mobile

Chinese travel booking site Qunar (NASDAQ:QUNR) sold a quarter of a million plane tickets in a single day for Chinese New Year, compared to 135,000 on its highest volume day last year. The company says it saw strong growth in international travel, tripling the volume of outbound travel bookings compared to Chinese New Year 2013.

On the peak day, half of the air tickets were booked through mobile. Most mobile bookings occurred within 20 days of the trip with a fifth of mobile bookings occurring within three days of the trip.

Additionally, Qunar reached almost five million train ticket queries in a single day.

Baidu-backed Qunar faces stiff competition from Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP), Elong, and Taobao for the country’s online travel booking market.

Here’s the top 10 international destinations for Chinese New year travelers:

  1. Hong Kong, China
  2. Taipei, Taiwan
  3. Bangkok, Thailand
  4. Seoul, Korea
  5. Singapore, Singapore
  6. Manila, Philippines
  7. Phuket, Thailand
  8. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  9. Tokyo Japan
  10. Chiang Mai, Thailand

And here’s the the top 20 train routes compared to last year:

Top 20 Train Routes during CNY
Year 2014 2013
1 Beijing Shanghai Beijing Harbin
2 Beijing Harbin Guangzhou Chongqing
3 Shanghai Nanjing Guangzhou Wuhan
4 Beijing Shijiazhuang Beijing Shanghai
5 Harbin Beijing Shenzhen Wuhan

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Community Writer

Paul Bischoff

Paul Bischoff is an American multimedia journalist based in Beijing. He co-founded and authored the now-retired Beijing Tech Report, and has also worked at the Xinhua News Agency and a local ABC TV station in the US. He’s generally against writing about himself in the third person, but occasionally makes exceptions. You can follow him on Twitter @pabischoff.