A: Trip.com Group is proud to redefine travel by moving beyond static bookings to experience-driven destination marketing. Through strategic alliances with Live Nation Entertainment and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), we transform premium events—concerts, tournaments, festivals—into primary travel drivers. By packaging exclusive event access with top-tier hospitality and transport, we create end-to-end cultural experiences that unlock significant value for destination partners. This approach disperses visitor traffic to secondary destinations and boosts shoulder-season travel, driving sustainable growth. As a result, we have delivered double-digit year-on-year increases in both passenger volume and GMV, setting a new benchmark for experiential travel globally.
A: Our Momentum 2025 consumer report makes it stark: niche, high-intent journeys are growing at twice the rate of traditional sightseeing. 63% of our users now anchor an entire trip around an event — a concert, a Grand Prix, a fashion week.
Consider the numbers. When Milan Fashion Week took place, we saw a 611% year-over-year surge in bookings to Milan. When BLACKPINK and SEVENTEEN announced K-pop concerts in Hong Kong, premium tickets sold out within ten seconds, and peak traffic on our platform exceeded 300,000 users per second.
Why? Because people no longer want to observe culture. They want to participate in it. Others want to immerse themselves in a culture and return home with a craft, a technique, a practice. A tea ceremony in Kyoto. New recipe skills from a cooking lesson in Puglia. We call this "Skillvenirs" — the new souvenir.
So how does Trip.com Group design for this? We have rebuilt our architecture around inspiration-led commerce. We capture travellers at the moment of dreaming — on TikTok or YouTube — and convert that travel dream into a booking instantly. Live events, anime expos, culinary deep-dives: we connect them directly to flights, hotels, and transfers.
Our platform no longer just sells trips. It curates memorable moments and journeys. And in doing so, we have turned culture and community into the new currency of travel.
A: The most critical insight for travel leaders today is that content must be dynamic, real-time and personalised to drive high-intent conversion.
Static itineraries and rigid listings no longer work in a digital-first marketplace. Leaders must harness data-driven optimisation—aggregating real-time consumer behaviour, verified reviews, sales volume and trends.
Trip.com Group has done this through curated lists such as Trip.Best and Trip.Pulse. These are live, AI-powered rankings that reflect shifting consumer sentiment, enabling authentic discovery. By leveraging these insights, Trip.com Group shares intelligence with destination partners and global DMOs. This allows them to tailor regional marketing campaigns with precision—ensuring the right message reaches the right traveller at the exact moment of inspiration.
A: The next phase of travel will not just be defined by where you can go, but by how effortlessly you get there. And one big trend that shapes that is AI.
AI has moved from back-office novelty to front-line planner. According to Google, travellers find AI-generated content useful for planning trips. In Australia, 61% of travellers who see an AI overview find it genuinely valuable. According to McKinsey, 62% of younger travelers (Millennials and Gen Z) in the US and Europe have actively used AI tools to plan their travel itineraries. 84% of those who used Gen AI report that the tools significantly improved their overall trip-planning experience. This is a fundamental shift in consumer behaviour.
At Trip.com Group, we are seeing that shift accelerate in real time. TripGenie, which is our AI assistant, has seen assisted bookings surging 400% year on year. Real-time tools such as live translation and menu assistants, are growing at similar triple-digit rates. Why? Because travellers increasingly want support not just in planning a trip, but throughout the journey itself — in real time, on the ground.
What excites me most is what this unlocks: long-tail demand. Remote eco resorts. Sold-out event tickets. Complex multi-destination itineraries. These were once too costly to service manually. AI makes them scalable.
So, the trend I am most focused on is this: from pre-trip planning to in-trip assistance. The platform that wins tomorrow is not the one with the biggest inventory. It is the one that travels with you.
A: The lesson that has stayed with me is this: reach only matters when the message resonates locally.
For years, global travel brands chased scale—more destinations, more channels, more languages. But the brands that win are not the biggest; they are the ones that go local before they go large. I have seen multi-million dollar campaigns fail because they were translated, not tailored. I have seen modest teams outperform giants because they understood a market's cultural fabric, not just its conversion metrics.
Depth of understanding will always outrun breadth of broadcast. So stop obsessing over how far your message travels. Obsess over how deeply it lands. In travel, as in anything human, proximity is power.
A: What has surprised me most is not the arrival of new technology, but the sheer velocity with which artificial intelligence has moved from conversation to action.
The real opportunity lies beyond chatbots and search bars. It lies in agentification — AI that doesn't just answer questions, but solves problems.
Nearly 60% of TripGenie interactions are now booking-related, spanning hotels, flights and attractions. Travellers frequently ask practical questions to seek reassurance: Does this hotel meet their needs? Is the location safe? Does this travel policy apply?
Moreover, beyond conversational interaction, users also progress to compare travel options, such as TripGenie's hotel comparison feature, which streamlines the process and reduces the number of clicks needed by 80%, and fosters higher engagement with a 45% increase in 7-day AI revisit rates.
A: We are moving beyond vision to execution. Our next phase is powered by three distinct pillars: