Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

A week before the release of the financial performance for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2024, Trip.com experienced a major executive reshuffle.

On February 17, Wall Street News learned that there were changes among the heads of various businesses at Trip.com, including AI, mergers and acquisitions, large transportation, and business travel. This move aims to enhance strategic execution and efficiency during a critical stage of strategic transformation and technology layout.

Trip.com Group's CEO Sun Jie stated that in the new year, the company will continue to promote business collaboration between departments and strengthen talent training and movement within the group, thereby further advancing the group’s G2 strategy and enhancing the overall competitiveness of the group.

As early as 2019, Liang Jianzhang, Chairman of the Board of Trip.com Group, proposed the G2 strategy, where G2 stands for two G's, representing Great Quality and Globalization, the former being customer-centric, providing the best service, and the latter representing Trip.com's globalization layout.

According to Liang Jianzhang's expectations at that time, Trip.com aimed to become Asia's largest international travel company within three years, the world's largest international travel company within five years, and the most valuable and respected online travel company within ten years. However, the pandemic disrupted Trip.com's strategic pace.

After the pandemic ended, with the recovery of the tourism market, Ctrip's performance rebounded rapidly. According to the Earnings Reports, Ctrip's net income for the third quarter of 2024 reached 15.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16%, and net income reached 6.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 47%.

Especially in the international Business, Ctrip's outbound hotel and flight bookings have returned to 120% of the level during the same period in 2019, and international OTA platform hotel and flight bookings increased by more than 60% year-on-year.

However, Ctrip still has a gap compared to the leading overseas OTA, Booking. Currently, Booking's Market Cap is 167 billion USD (approximately 1215.76 billion yuan), which is 3.7 times that of Ctrip. In terms of revenue scale, in the third quarter of 2024, Booking's revenue was 8 billion USD, far exceeding Ctrip's performance during the same period.

Currently, Ctrip is continuously working around the Global Strategy direction in order to quickly regain the strategic rhythm delayed by the pandemic and capture more market share.

In terms of high quality, Ctrip has been continuously increasing its investment in AI in recent years. Ctrip has built a systematic AI technology solution, which includes various models such as the tourism vertical large model 'Ctrip Wenda', along with product development capabilities and popular new technologies like AI Agent.

This time, Ctrip appointed Chen Gang as the Group Chief Product Officer to lead the formulation of group AI-related product strategies, which is a further upgrade of the AI strategy.

According to Wall Street news, Chen Gang joined the company through Ctrip's acquisition of Tietong Network in 2011, subsequently leading the establishment of the train ticket Business Unit and the split of the automobile ticket Business. In 2018, Chen Gang led Qunar to complete a comprehensive restructuring. It can be said that Chen Gang is a key figure in Ctrip's capability to compete.

With the future direction very clear, what Ctrip currently needs most is to integrate resources and improve the organization's efficiency, which is also a key driving force behind this executive adjustment.

Specifically, the CEO of the Ticket Division, Tan Yudong, has been appointed as the Group's Chief Scientist, responsible for the technology and mergers and acquisitions strategy of the Group and its subsidiaries; Feng Yan, who excels in business synergy and resource integration, has taken on the role of CEO of the Transportation Business, overseeing the management of the Ticket Business Group, Train Ticket Business Group, and Financial Department; Zhang Yong has been appointed as the CEO of the Ticket Business Group, reporting to Feng Yan; Feng Yan, Tan Yudong, and Song Tao report to Xiong Xing.

The AI era combined with the globalization trend of the tourism market has brought unprecedented opportunities to Trip.com. After more than twenty years of development, Trip.com has accumulated a certain depth in the Industry Chain and service capability; however, to seize greater incremental opportunities, Trip.com must be fully prepared to deal with Consumer fluctuations and international competition.

The major adjustments in the executive team may just be the beginning; in the rapidly changing market conditions, Trip.com also needs to make further adjustments.