The global OTA market is dominated by major international players including Expedia and Booking Holdings, making it one of the most competitive sectors in travel.

But another brand with roots in Asia has been making significant strides internationally in recent years, supported by the scale of its domestic market and expansion of its global travel business.

Trip.com is the international OTA brand owned by Trip.com Group the parent company formed out of Ctrip, which was founded in 1999 as an OTA dedicated to China.

Trip.com Group is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, and has become an increasingly significant player in the global online travel sector.

At Trip.com’s first ever Airline Global Conference (AGC) held outside of Asia ABN spoke to its newly appointed chief executive of flights Chee Teong (CT) Ooi about the company’s global flights strategy and the role of technology, trust and partnership in the future of airline retailing.

He has a quarter of a century’s experience in travel distribution and has worked for Trip.com Group since 2015 when he joined Ctrip to head the global flight team.

This saw him play an important role in transitioning Trip.com Group from a purely Chinese domestic player to a serious competitor on the international stage.

This year an important milestone has been reached with international growth becoming one of Trip.com Group’s key strategic drivers.

During the AGC CT and Lufthansa vice president of digital retailing and order management Heinrich Lang shared a stage to talk about co-creating the future.

“With the technologies and capabilities we have built across Trip.com Group, we can help shape the evolution of flight distribution and airline retailing,” CT said.

For CT success for Trip.com Group will come if it delivers value to the market, and that means working with airlines to help them achieve their goals, not fighting against them.

The theme of the AGC, which took place in Amsterdam, was co-creating the future with keywords like ‘Intelligence’, ‘Trust’, and ‘Partnership’ driving the discussion.

For CT taking an approach honed domestically in China to an international audience is not about top down imposing its model on those regional markets.

“When we do globalisation, we recognise that you can’t fit one model for every market,” he said.

“That’s why, when we say globalisation, its global plus local. We need to have a global platform that can drive standardisation, with technologies and efficiencies.

“But in order to penetrate a market, localisation is essential — from payments, customer behaviour and search, to customer service.

“And even in marketing and finding the right peak seasons, even using the right wording to attract customers need to be localised.

“So, Trip.com Group’s strategy is to serve local markets by leveraging local talent.

“We set up a lot of reginal offices and local teams who help us understand customer behaviour, needs and expectations in each market.

“And our team in Shanghai is mandated that we should absorb, learn and adapt, and satisfy this group of people, because they represent the customer locally.

“We are not an OTA who just has a single standard for all markets. We believe in standards, but we also believe in localisation.”

One area in which Trip.com sees an opportunity to drive new standards across all of its markets is in technology. It considers itself to be a tech partner for its airline clients.

Currently this involves a significant investment in AI and agentic commerce technologies that are rapidly changing the entire travel e-commerce and distribution landscape.

A message repeated at the AGC was if the industry collaborates, the combined investment in AI tech will more than match any potential single outside disruptor.

CT senses a mix of excitement and concern about the impact of AI, but one thing he does not see changing is that the airlines will remain the ultimate service provider.

“I have seen this in many times in the travel industry; the first and one thing that always holds true is airlines have the content, the airline is the operator.

We are not here to replace airlines. We are here to work with them as a technology, distribution and service partner. Airlines will always have the ultimate say over their product, and our role is to help them reach demand, support customers and create a smoother travel experience.”

As the industry moves into this new era of AI, CT sees a chance for everyone to play their part, and that will ultimately add up to making the whole more efficient.

“I think the industry needs to be pragmatic about agentic AI. We will be able to do things much better, but will it really disrupt and replace anybody?

“At this moment, I don’t see the possibility of that. I believe every single industry player will go into that arena and everyone will continue to have a role to play.

“The only problem I see in future is AI hallucinates. The important thing to a consumer is trust. I need to have trust and make sure the AI comes to me with the right answers.

“At the end of the day, the one who holds the most original user insights will have the clearest view, because they are closest to the source of truth.

“There are certain things that airlines will do better and certain things that OTAs like ourselves will do better.

“The ecosystems of agentic AI is likely to reshape the traditional search model, but the core of the travel ecosystem will still depend on trusted content, strong partners and reliable service.”

One area that Trip.com Group sees AI being successfully applied to is in curating the perfect itinerary for the customer based on their individual requirements.

The OTA has developed and launched its own AI-powered travel assistant called Trip Genie that can answer questions in a natural, conversational interface.

Customers are able to get real human expert-generated recommendations using its Custom Trips service.

As AI develops CT sees this becoming more of an automated service that crafts customer’s journeys for them.

AI is already being used to generate content and translate travel reviews Trip.com generates into multiple languages while maintaining the authority of a real person.

The principle lying behind the approach is that “the traveller is sovereign” and not owned by anyone, an idea Global Distribution System Amadeus echoed at the AGC.

“As customers we do not like to be owned by anybody. As a traveller myself I want to make sure that I have the choice. I want to make sure that I have the control.

“OTAs like Trip.com and airlines, we should be co-creating together, looking at the entire value chain of the travellers themselves.

“If we act in silos by ourselves, there’s a lot of gaps, a lot of frictions. So how do we remove those frictions?

“Using technology that we built together we’re moving closer. To a traveller they cannot understand if I can do something with an airline, why my OTA doesn’t know about it.

“Information has to be bi-directional. This is what we are talking airlines about; to reinvent the old model to something that has one commonality: the travel experience.

When I joined our company, I saw that there was significant technological complexity behind serving customers—something that isn’t always visible to airlines, simply because they see the ecosystem from a different angle.

“We should be more trustful with each other, and we can really deliver the right value at the right time and the right space for the customer.

“At the end of the day, if customers are happy purchasing an airline through a channel, receive the right support and trust the experience, they will come back and book again.”