This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.
In the 26 years since its founding, Trip.com Group has become an industry-leading and widely respected player in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market. Through a customer-first philosophy and a dedication to service excellence, the company has built deep loyalty and long-term trust among millions of travelers worldwide.
In recent years, the Group, with its Trip.com brand, has applied that winning formula to new markets. With growing teams across Europe and a rapidly expanding presence in the United States, the company is focused on understanding and adapting to local traveler needs to deliver the same high-quality experience that has defined its success in Asia.
At the Skift Transatlantic Summit in NYC this October, Edison Chen, vice president of Trip.com Group, shared how the company’s DNA — built on service, personalization, and partnerships — is guiding its global expansion.
Taking a Personalized Approach to Globalization
To translate success in the competitive Asian travel market into global expansion, Trip.com is striking a balance between a global mindset and in-depth localization efforts. “It’s important for us to think globally, but act locally,” Chen said.
This philosophy guides Trip.com’s strategy of building local teams that understand and engage directly with partners and travelers on the ground. The company delivers localized content, services, and payment options tailored to each market, ensuring travelers feel understood and supported wherever they are. Treating every region, country, or city as its own distinct entity enables Trip.com to connect the global brand with real people in real communities. Even two neighboring cities might display different user behaviors, booking habits, payment preferences, service expectations, and more. Respecting these differences builds Trip.com’s reputation as a reliable provider with an intimate understanding of the traveler.
Each time Trip.com enters a new market, it looks to deepen those personal connections. The company establishes local teams and hires local staff to offer more relevant services and communicate with local industry partners on the ground. Trip.com also provides localized content to both partners and travelers.
That localization approach blends seamlessly with the brand’s personalization strategy.
By ensuring that the product they offer, the services they provide, and the content they deliver fit each traveler as much as possible, Trip.com can translate its core brand offering anywhere in the world. “Everybody travels differently today,” Chen said. “We need to understand our customers well to design for them.”
Building Close Collaborations With Industry Partners
Partnerships are at the heart of Trip.com’s global approach. Rather than viewing partnerships purely as supply channels, the company works hand-in-hand with tourism boards, destination marketing organizations, airlines, hotels, and attractions to create shared value.
“We focus on delivering exceptional service for travelers while building strong, mutually beneficial relationships with our partners,” Chen said. “Our success comes from elevating the entire ecosystem, not just one part of it.”
By fostering partnerships with tourism boards, destination marketing organizations, and travel suppliers such as airlines, hotels, and attractions, Trip.com creates a rising tide that lifts all ships. Their full-funnel partnership model enables them to provide extensive resources to each partner. Top-of-the-funnel efforts might focus on building brand awareness, mid-funnel activities might boost audience engagement, and increasing conversion helps build bottom-of-the-funnel results.
This approach also applies to cross-industry partnerships that help Trip.com keep pace with broader travel trends. For example, a partnership with MasterCard unlocks value-added services for the high-end loyalty membership tier. And partnering with Live Nation taps into the experience travel boom that Chen has said is exploding in the Asian market.
“Entertainment and sports tourism have become a big trend in the APAC region. The younger generation flies to Singapore for Taylor Swift or to Korea for Blackpink. It challenges us to understand what’s happening for travelers generationally,” Chen said.
Using Data to Unlock Efficiency at Scale
Witnessing these market shifts in the region it knows best has prepared Trip.com for the pace of change in Europe and the U.S. Not only are travelers’ demands different from market to market, but they also change over time as new trends take effect. “Next time, it won’t just be about entertainment,” Chen said. “We are already seeing growing interest in adjacent sectors such as beauty, health, and overall wellbeing — areas that increasingly influence how people plan and experience travel.”
Data is the backbone of Trip.com’s innovation strategy. By analyzing global booking and search patterns, the company can anticipate traveler behavior, identify emerging destinations, and collaborate with partners to manage demand more effectively.
Chen explained that while data is top of mind for many travel brands, how companies utilize their data is just as important as collecting quality data in the first place. “Data is very important for us to understand the market and change our product, service, and partnership strategies.”
Trip.com leverages aggregated insights to help partners better understand travel demand and market trends. These insights inform joint planning and campaign design, while AI tools optimize partner workflows and enhance the quality and contextualization of content presented to end-users.
And AI applications help facilitate that collaboration at scale, improving efficiency not just with data analysis but also around service delivery, itinerary planning, and content accuracy.
As Trip.com accelerates its international growth, its goal is to evolve from a trusted booking platform into a co-creator of travel experiences, adding tangible value for travelers, partners, and destinations worldwide.
Prioritizing Customer Service Standards
Customer service has always been central to Trip.com’s identity. Offering high-quality products is table stakes for travel service providers today, and pricing considerations are just one element of the decision-making process — unparalleled customer service is the glue supporting meaningful relationships between travelers and the Trip.com brand. “Travelers aren’t just looking for cheap fares,” Chen said. “They’re also looking for trust and inspiration — the kind that comes from timely, tailored content that helps them imagine and plan their next trip.”
Trip.com employs 16,000 customer service staff members working from nine call centers spread across the globe. This enables the company to ensure reliable, multilingual, and round-the-clock support for every traveler. Chen confirmed that most calls to Trip.com customer service lines are answered within 30 seconds.
This high standard of care has been instrumental to Trip.com’s success in the APAC region and fundamental to its expansion efforts in other markets. “No matter the type of business, if you’re a travel service provider, a hotel, or an airline, your service standard is critical to travelers,” Chen said.
This content was created collaboratively by Trip.com and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.
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