Ctrip offers big savings with flight + hotel packages

If you’ve been trolling the Internet looking for your next vacation spot (or is that just us?), you might have noticed that the Ctrip page is looking a bit different -- they’ve thrown up a new homepage and made it easier for people to book packages (think flights plus hotel stays). 

This could be a pretty sweet update for Shanghai travel junkies. 

“More and more travelers are taking advantage of the upcoming three-day Spring holidays that were once the seven-day May holiday,” says Coley Dale, senior manager for Ctrip, the largest English-language travel website, reminding us of the painful loss of one of our beloved Golden Weeks. 

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“Yunnan, for example, might not be a weekend trip from Shanghai or Beijing for most, but that extra day really helps people to get out and see the country without taking time off work. Our customers tend to travel frequently within China during these holidays and our site is geared towards providing them with the best possible options for any range of budgets or destinations,” continues Dale explaining the new “Flight + Hotel” packages.

The new pages with travel packages are streamlined versions of what you’re used to on the site, with the press release boasting that people will be able to save up to RMB 2,000 on their holiday.

If that's true, it’s a serious reason to celebrate.

Although most of the packages are for domestic routes and hotels right now (the new site and packages cover about 85 cities in China), Ctrip is promising that there will be increased international route coverage as well in the next few months. 

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“We’re launching more and more routes to get you to a growing number of international destinations,” says Dale. The new routes are catering to people’s need to travel and “enjoy authentic Thai food on tropical shores,” he says.

We can get behind that.

This might be just the thing we need to get over our post-Chinese New Year travel apathy and start planning for May.