Alibaba spins off travel business as it attacks China’s $10 billion online trip booking market

Alibaba highlighted the importance of online travel booking today by spinning off its travel sites into a separate business. For China’s online shoppers, this means a new website that brings together all of Alibaba’s travel offerings.

The new site, Alitrip, consolidates the existing national and international bookings for planes, hotels, cruises, package tours, and more from across Alibaba’s main Chinese ecommerce marketplaces (Taobao, Tmall, and the Juhuasuan daily deals site).

Alitrip claims to have over 10,000 merchants selling travel products. Alibaba is getting bigger names in the travel industry involved too. Today the ecommerce titan revealed that Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific and hotel-booking site Agoda have agreed to join Alitrip in time for China’s equivalent of Cyber Monday, which occurs on November 11.

To assure online shoppers that it’s safe to use all these merchants spread across Alitrip – rather than an all-in-one online service, such as arch-rival Ctrip – Alibaba says it has set up a RMB 100 million (US$16.3 million) consumer protection fund that promises refunds within an hour.

China’s top two travel sites in terms of sales are Ctrip and Elong.

China’s online travel booking market is worth RMB 61.4 billion (US$10 billion) in consumer expenditure, according to the newest data available from iResearch for Q2 2014.

See: 500 Startups-backed travel startup wants to open up more of China to foreign tourists