Suning’s Online Flights and Hotel Booking Service Ready for Take-Off

China’s top travel websites are about to get a shock as China’s vast bricks-and-mortar retailer Suning (SHE:002024) is set to launch an online travel portal, selling flight tickets and hotel reservations. It’s all part of Suning’s aggressive push into online shopping, pushing its gadgets and home appliances on the web, and expanding into new e-commerce directions as well.

The Suning online travel portal (pictured above) is currently in testing, and could launch as soon as next week. It’s potentially bad news not only for established ticketing sites like Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP) and eLong (NASDAQ:LONG), but also for some large e-commerce rivals who’ve been diversifying into travel as well. More specifically, that’s 360Buy, which launched a hotel booking service in February to complete its own line-up.

Suning’s VP, Li Bin, confirmed to Chinese media that the travel portal is ready for take-off, saying that it will cover 26 domestic airlines, and over 25,000 hotels. In addition, 2,300 hotels have agreed to group buy deals that should see prices slashed for certain special offers. Hotel chains on-board with Suning include big names like Sofitel, and Chinese mid-range locations like Motel 168.

The B2C e-commerce space in China is an especially tough one, and Suning – which was founded in 1990 and now has over 700 stores across China – is a late-starter online that has the deep pockets to muscle its way into contention. To get there, it’s up against the electronics, e-books, and other offerings from 360Buy, Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), Amazon’s Z.cn (NASDAQ:AMZN), and fellow big-box retailer Gome (HKG:0493).

[Source: Donews – article in Chinese]