Trip.com and Damai: How China's Travel and Ticketing Business Is Outrunning Pre-Pandemic Numbers

While Western media debate a slowdown in the Chinese economy, two Chinese travel businesses are telling the opposite story: demand for trips to and within China is growing faster than before the pandemic. For anyone bringing a business delegation to China rather than tourists, this isn't abstract macro data — it's the same infrastructure flow: visa regimes, direct flights, hotel capacity, that corporate benchmarking tourism relies on too.

Trip.com: inbound travel is outgrowing outbound

携程 / Trip.com Group — China's largest travel platform — reported revenue of CNY 14.8 billion in its latest reported quarter, up 16% year-on-year. The more interesting number isn't the headline figure but its composition: reservations on the company's international OTA platform rose more than 60% year-on-year, while inbound bookings (foreigners traveling to China) rose more than 100% — more than doubling. Outbound hotel and air-ticket bookings (Chinese travelers going abroad) surpassed pre-COVID 2019 levels by roughly 20%.

For the next quarter, Trip.com's management guided for more modest revenue growth of 3-8% year-on-year, a sign of a maturing market overall. But the inbound segment specifically — the one reflecting foreign interest in visiting China — remains the fastest-growing part of the business, not the company's overall growth rate.

Damai: live events as a standalone business

大麦 / Damai — a ticketing platform for concerts, theater and sports events, owned by Alibaba since 2017 — went through a rebrand in 2025: the former Alibaba Pictures Group became Damai Entertainment Holdings, broadening its focus from film to live events as a whole. The platform has over 100 million registered users and has served more than 1.8 million events.

Over the six months through September 2025, Damai's revenue grew 33% year-on-year to RMB 4 billion, while profit rose 54% to RMB 519.5 million. In November 2025, the company launched MAISEAT, a platform for going global, and in 2026 it landed its first primary-ticketing role outside China: a concert by Chinese rapper GAI in Malaysia.

Why this isn't only about tourists

Trip.com's inbound growth and Damai's globalization aren't isolated leisure stories. They're symptoms of the same process: China is building infrastructure premised on foreigners visiting not once, but repeatedly — and not just to see pandas and the Great Wall. The same logic underpins corporate benchmarking tourism: delegations visiting factories and headquarters ride the same grid of direct flights, easier visas, and hotel infrastructure that's growing alongside ordinary inbound tourism.

For companies planning a business expedition into ticketing, live events and online travel, this means the logistics side of the trip — flights, visas, accommodation — is more reliable today than it was two or three years ago: the infrastructure serving the mass inbound flow also serves business visits.

It's not just Trip.com and Damai

Neither player operates in a vacuum: on the same field are 飞猪 / Fliggy, Alibaba's travel platform built into the Taobao and Alipay ecosystem, and 同程旅行 / Tongcheng, which specializes in bookings from tier-2 and tier-3 cities — where most of the growth in domestic Chinese travel demand actually lives. The competition among these players is a further argument that China's inbound and domestic travel infrastructure isn't advancing because of one company, but because of systemic market pressure, with several large platforms investing in the same direction at once.

What comes next

Both Trip.com and Damai are moving in the same direction: not just growing inside China, but becoming a bridge between Chinese and foreign demand — Trip.com through inbound tourism, Damai by exporting its ticketing infrastructure to new markets via MAISEAT. For anyone considering working with China, that's an added signal: the country isn't just open for visits — it's investing in making those visits frequent and predictable.

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