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Qunar Cup on SOHU Shows Chinese Still Keen on Fun

Qunar.com
2009-01-19 17:56 1910

72% of Qunar Users Have Travel Plans for 2009

BEIJING, Jan. 19 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Qunar.com, China's largest travel search engine, has been working with Sohu.com (Nasdaq: SOHU), one of China's most influential online communities, to create a platform for Chinese travelers to share their experience and future travel plans. The results show that Chinese travelers are continuing to make both domestic and international travel plans with an emphasis on 'fun,' 'budget' and 'cool.'

The Qunar Cup is an experience-sharing contest on Sohu Communities' Travel Club portal. Sohu.com Inc. is one of China's premier online brands and is indispensable to the daily life of millions of Chinese. The Qunar Cup aims to provide a platform for Chinese travelers to share their most memorable travel experiences. Within the first week of its launch in December 2008, tens of thousands of visitors shared their favorite travel memories and their travel plans for 2009. Participants in the Qunar Cup also stand to win prizes based on the popularity of their entries.

Despite the global economic slowdown, Chinese travelers continue to demonstrate strong interest in domestic and overseas travel. According to the latest data by iResearch, users of online travel reservations in China crossed 6 million, to an estimated RMB 2.8 billion in 2008. This represents a 22.7% growth compared to the previous year.

This optimism is evident in many of the entries in the "Qunar Cup", where some of the most popular topics include "Fun", at 65% of respondents, "Budget", at 58%, and "Cool", at 32%.

Sohu's Interactive Communities Manager Yang Hua commented, "With an average of 130 million page views a day, Sohu Communities is one of China's most popular platforms. Having worked closely with industry leaders across a variety of verticals, we are very pleased to be working with Qunar.com to bring this highly successful Qunar Cup event to our members."

Qunar also commissioned international research firm Synovate to provide independent analysis of the intentions of Qunar site visitors. The research reveals that 72% of Qunar users have already planned domestic leisure travel for 2009, while 29% of Qunar users have indicated their intentions to travel internationally for leisure.

According to Dixon Dai, VP Marketing of Qunar, "Working with Sohu on the Qunar Cup program has given us valuable insight into the plans of Chinese travelers. As China's first and largest travel search engine, Qunar remains very committed to improving the travel experiences of the Chinese traveler. With 72% of our users committing to travel plans as a result of visiting Qunar.com this demonstrates to our advertising partners that we create value for their business."

About Sohu

Sohu.com Inc. (NASDAQ: SOHU) is China's premier online brand and indispensable to the daily life of millions of Chinese, providing a network of web properties and community based/web 2.0 products which offer the vast Sohu user community a broad array of choices regarding information, entertainment and communication. Sohu has built one of the most comprehensive matrices of Chinese language web properties and proprietary search engines, consisting of seven leading web properties.

About Qunar.com

Qunar is the leading travel meta-search engine in China, focused on providing the most comprehensive and accurate information for travel services. Qunar users are able to search for information and compare pricing for flights, hotels and visas in order to make better informed travel decisions.

Based in Beijing, Qunar represents a significant step in the development of China's rapidly growing online travel industry. Qunar searches and aggregates information from almost 400 travel web sites providing real time information from more than 3,000 airlines routes and 30,000 hotels.

Launched in May 2005, Qunar has quickly become one of China's top travel media with over 30 million unique visitors each month. Qunar's users represent China's upwardly mobile new generation of consumers who are frequent travelers, comfortable with online transactions and willing to spend a significant amount of their disposable income on traveling to new and exciting places.

Qunar means "where are you going?" in mandarin Chinese. For more information about Qunar, please visit www.qunar.com.

Source: Qunar.com
Keywords: Travel
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