Whats the biggest difference between the corporate travel business in China versus the rest of the world?
Everything there is still paper ticket, with all the processing and reconciliation that goes along with that. So you still have a large back-office operation in China today that you don’t see in the U.S. The mandate is for everyone in China to move to e-tickets by 2007, so that gathering of data will be automated. But right now, the travel agent in China operates off four computer platforms and they constantly have to bring information back and forth. We live in a plastic economy, where everything is credit card. China is a cash-based economy. And the concept of introducing plastic and reporting (data) off of plastic is very new to Chinese companies. How do you plan to expand your China business? We’re focusing on the domestic market with Chinese companies – that’s a $3.7-billion market – as well as further developing the international companies who operate joint ventures in China. We also want to speed up the pace of technology and automation with online booking tools. We can grow, bu
