Online travel agency
Trip.com has come a long way since 2015 when airline IT and distribution expert CT Ooi, who has been named as CEO for the Group’s
flight business unit, first joined the company.
In
just more than a decade since those developments, revenues have soared from RMB10.9 billion (US$1.7 billion) in 2015 to RMB62.4 billion (US$8.9 billion) in 2025. Trip.com is now one of the world’s leading
travel companies by gross merchandise value (GMV).
CT Ooi spoke to
Phocuswire at the company’s Airline Global Conference in the sleek surroundings
of Passenger Terminal Amsterdam in the Dutch capital earlier this month about the changes he has witnessed at the global company.
“When I joined in
2015, the company had the aspiration to transform from a China domestic player
into a global one,” he said.
“Since then, I have
been helping the company to set up this vision and grow the business. Our international
business contributed about 40% of total revenue and bookings in 2025.”
CT sees Trip.com in a class
of its own when it comes to airline partnerships. The company offers flights
from more than 680 carriers globally. In fact, some 75 airline partners were
present at the conference, which had the theme of “Co-Creating Value: Leading
the Future of Travel Through Intelligence, Trust and Partnership.”
“I want airlines just
not to view Trip.com as an agent. We are a tech company in the travel industry.
We are not just a normal ticketing agency,” CT
said.
“Using technology to
enhance user experience is our passion and we can't do it alone. We need
airports, we need airlines, we need technology companies like Amadeus. So we're
trying to bring all this together to solve the one trillion-dollar question—how
to have seamless travel for the customer?”
In this world of
partnership, traveler experience is everything, CT said.
“Travelers are
sovereign. We want to make sure that travelers have choice and control.
Together, OTAs like Trip.com and airlines, we should be looking at the entire
value chain of the traveler themselves,” he said.
“At the moment, if you
silo yourself as an airline or an OTA there are a lot of gaps and friction. So
how do we remove that friction? Using technology that we build together, not
just with the GDS but the airline hosts themselves, to create more seamless
technology. We are talking about aligned data visibility. For example, the OCN
[Order Change Notification when an order is changed] is currently in the NDC
standard. That is one of the goals. For a traveler, they cannot understand why
if they do it with an airline, the OTA doesn't know about it. The information
has to be bi-directional.”
Trip.com is well
placed to help with this, particularly in the area of customer service.
“Customer service is
where we earn trust from the consumers and from the airline industry,” CT said.
During COVID, when
airlines were forced to cancel flights and disruption rocketed, CT said that Trip.com proactively handled customer issues,
even addressing complaints about airlines at the OTA’s own expense.
“We understand that
trust is difficult to build and once broken is gone very fast,” he said.
“Customer service is one of our most important USPs [unique selling
propositions],” he said.
CT said Trip.com is “very
different from other OTAs.” The evidence for this difference is in the level of
partnership, he said.
“We have major support from the airlines to
try doing things a bit differently. I came from the GDS world, and I thought I
knew airline systems,” he said.
“When I joined the
Trip.com Group, I discovered there was so much more in order to service
customers. Airlines and OTAs should be more trustful of each other, so we can
really deliver the right value at the right time to the customer. At the end of
the day, we both win.”
Trip.com has also
broken the OTA mold by acting as a supplemental customer service center for
some carriers in China.
“Giving service to
customers is an OTA job but it is also an airline job. The customer wants to be
taken care of, but it's the philosophy, the airline commitments, the service
level agreements and key performance indicators that you put in place that drives
the different actions.”
At the conference,
Trip.com also announced details of a collaboration with IATA through the organization’s Data and Technology
Strategic Partnership—helping to make end-to-end air travel more seamless.
The initiative aims to
explore how travelers may securely use digital identities stored in mobile
wallets such as Google Wallet and Apple Wallet to autofill
booking details, reducing friction and minimizing errors.
Participating airlines
in the initiative are expected to include Air Canada, Turkish
Airlines and Qatar Airways, alongside technology partner Hopae.
With so many airlines
in the room, the current geopolitical environment was not far from everyone’s
thoughts.
“All of the airlines I have spoken to recently
acknowledge there is a period of uncertainty right now. But all of us, deep
inside, believe that the airline industry, and the travel industry, is very
resilient,” CT said.
“I've talked to Asian
and European carriers, and they are taking this opportunity to change their
networks and flight patterns and looking at how they can serve customers
better. In the meantime, they are looking at where there are growth
opportunities when the consumer comes back when the cost comes down. We are
still focusing on the future.
In addition, how
Trip.com will work with artificial intelligence was a regular theme of the
conference.
Amy Wei, Trip.com’s
senior product director, told the audience, “People are talking about agentic
bookings. We are not only talking about it, we have already executed it.” She
went on to demonstrate how travelers could compare and buy eSIMs within Trip.com’s AI agent TripGenie.
Meanwhile, James
Spalding, regional director for Northern Europe, Turkey and North America in
Trip.com’s flight business unit, said there had been a 400% year-on-year growth
in AI-assisted bookings and a quarter of AI-related interactions are pre- and
post-trip service inquiries.
CT pointed to another
innovative way Trip.com is using AI.
“We actually do
weather forecasts. Why? Because it helps on the right timing to scale customer
service calls,” he said.
Spalding added that
the company identified 121 of what the company calls “annual special events”
during 2025—events such as weather-related disruption and geopolitical
incidents that provoke higher levels of customer service activity than during
business as usual.
CT summed up the company’s
views on how AI can be leveraged.
“In an AI-driven,
interconnected travel landscape, no single player can create value alone,” he
said.
“The next phase of
airline–OTA partnerships will be defined by structured, tech-enabled
collaboration, from revenue sharing to joint customer experience roadmaps. Real
value will come from functional integration, demand-shaping algorithms and
conversational AI, delivering measurable wins for airlines, platforms and
travelers.”