When Lan Ping wanted to take a trip to the Maldives this summer, she turned to an online bulletin board instead of a travel agent to plan it.

"It is what everybody is doing now," said the 24 year old. "The comments in the online travel forums look more real and personal."

Lan is one of a growing number of Chinese tourists logging onto discussion forums to share vacation diaries, search for information and seek advice from other travelers, according to a new survey from Nielsen China Outbound Travel Monitor.

The Internet has become the most important medium for the country's growing number of tourists to plan vacations, the survey said.

While most Chinese visit traditional travel websites for research, they are likely to finalize their itineraries via interaction with other netizens on social networking platforms, according to the survey.

Nearly 100 million Chinese netizens regularly visit online bulletin boards to share opinions, ask for help or socialize with friends, according to 2008 figures from the China Internet Network Information Center.

"Word of mouth is the major factor for travelers when picking airline tickets or hotels," said Nan Nan, marketing manager for travel search engine Qunar.com. "For them, strangers are more reliable than advertisements."

Online advertising, however, is also having more influence on Chinese travelers than advertising in more traditional mediums, like television and print. Almost 70 percent of those surveyed remembered seeing travel ads on the Internet, the Nielsen survey said.

A number of online travel services that cater to the Chinese market are benefiting from the trend.

Ctrip.com, the largest online travel service in the country, reported a net profit of $159 million in the second quarter of this year - an increase of 33 percent over the same quarter last year, an official at the company said.

"Every day our online travel forum receives 2 million page views, and the destination exploration channels receive 1.1 million page views," said Tang Yibo, manager of Ctrip.com's holiday department.

Tang said his department alone generated revenues of US$5 million in the second quarter of this year, an increase of more than 50 percent from the same quarter a year before.

The online trend also has implications for foreign tourism businesses trying to tap into a growing market of Chinese tourists planning trips abroad.

Despite the rapid growth of Chinese tourists traveling both domestically and internationally in recent years, the market remains relatively underdeveloped. Many international tourism businesses are trying to find ways to cater to the tastes of Chinese consumers.

Less than 2 percent of the total destination media expenditure goes to Internet advertising, according to the Nielsen report. Many countries did not spend any money on online ads, it said.

The report also found that while tourism bodies in South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia utilized all major mediums to promote destinations to Chinese consumers, tourism organizations in many European countries only used magazines and newspapers.

"Advertising in China could be horrendously expensive if we weren't getting it to the right market," said Jennifer Cronin, vice president of sales and marketing for hotel chain Dusit International. "It is still such an unknown."

China is a huge market, "but it is not a mature market yet," Cronin added. "So you could waste a lot of money going into China."

Dusit is planning to open an office in Shanghai as part of future plans to expand further into the Chinese market, said Cronin.

"One of the things we are just getting comparative quotes on right now is doing our website in Chinese," Cronin said. "I guess it is the online market that we see as probably having a better return on investment for us in the future."

(China Daily August 28, 2009)