Tech advances to energize corporate travel industry

Technological advancements and rising labor costs will help China's booming corporate travel industry to become more intelligent, diversified and customized, a new industry report said on Tuesday.

According to the 2017 China Corporate Travel Market Analysis Report, the size of the corporate travel market in the country reached 158.7 billion yuan ($24.3 billion) in 2017, up 8.4 percent from a year earlier. It is expected to grow by 9.6 percent year-on-year to 174 billion yuan in 2018, said the report jointly complied by Ctrip Corporate Travel Management and Pinchain Travel, an online tourism consultancy.

Meanwhile, people have moved from offline to online channels to book flights and hotel rooms because of the proliferation of smartphones, it said. About 65 percent of the Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises made such reservations on mobile devices last year. Reservations made via smartphone applications took up 60 percent of the total orders last year in China.