The Hong Kong China International Tourism Investment Corporation announced its plan to build a Mango website and operate in 2006, arousing great attention and interest in experts on China's online tourism operation during the ongoing China International Travel Mart.

Experts said China's online tourism operations have a huge potential but currently are small in scale.

According to statistics, online hotel reservations were only 510 million yuan last year and the number is expected to reach 1.8 billion yuan in three years. The market share of China's e-commerce tourism dealings only occupied less than one percent of total tourism share. This did not match with China's position as the world's big nation of tourism and the large number of Internet users.

Judging from China's current situation, it is still early to fully realize online tourism reservation. First of all, a comprehensive customer service center needs to be set up in China, said Wu Zhiwen, president of Mango website Friday.

He added that online tourism reservations will be a trend in China's tourism consumption in the future. At the first stage of the online tourism reservation period, most of reservations need to be done by customer service centers. As payment methods diversify, people will increase their trust on e-commerce, thus giving priority to online reservation.

(Xinhua News Agency November 26, 2005)