Event Recap: Member Exclusive CTrip Site Visit
On Tuesday morning 35 curious AustCham Shanghai members boarded the bus from the AustCham Shanghai office, set for Ctrip’s headquarters.
As we arrived at the architectural marvel that is Sky SOHO, it was hard to choose where best to look and what photos to take first. 12 standalone buildings and 16 interconnected sky bridges surrounded us, as too did a sea of Ctrip employees making their way into work for the day. The headquarters currently houses over 10, 000 of the 30, 000 Ctrip employees worldwide.
Designed to represent four bullet trains about to take off, the headquarters spans 86,000sm. After a group photo and a brief of Ctrip facilities, we headed inside to see and learn about the history of the company from a lifesized timeline in the building’s foyer.
Members then got to experience the Ctrip ‘Network Operation Centre’ (NOC) where a team of tech professionals manned a NASA-like control room. Think the Command Deck in an episode of Star Trek. Using voice activation, the Ctrip team talked us through a screen of digital maps showing top searches, bookings, attractions, destinations and travel around the world, in realtime.
After a walk through the offices, we sat down to a presentation by Ctrip management of the growing functions of Ctrip, trends and the company’s ambitions in the Online Travel Booking space.
We then sat down to a delicious lunch at one of four onsite a la carte cafeterias before a group of happy (and full) AustCham Shanghai members boarded the bus back to Jing’An.
We’d like to extend our thanks to Ctrip and the team for their hospitality, and our members who attended.
You can check out some of the highlights of the site visit in the photos below.
