Qunar arms new platform amid price war

Qunar.com Inc, an online provider of travel bookings, said on Tuesday it will spend $30 million to build a travel-service platform in its latest attempt to win an ongoing price war among the nation's top online booking websites.

"The platform will provide infrastructure services to travel service providers and help them offer efficient and standardized services to consumers," the company said, adding that the money will be used to develop the platform and hire engineers.

The new platform is to make use of a third-party payment service, a plan Qunar did not disclose detailed information about.

China's online booking websites are faced with cutthroat competition as they try to grab a larger market share as summer vacation draws near.

Qunar's plan was announced less than half a month after its competitor, Ctrip.com International Ltd, introduced a year-long, low-price promotion campaign to invest $5 billion.

Other online travel booking websites, including mango.com, tuniu.com and the US-listed eLong Inc, also introduced similar promotion campaigns in June.

But Qunar said the competition has prices back "on track to being rational".

"Products with reasonable costs and services that are of a high quality will benefit consumers," the company said.

gaoyuan@chinadaily.com.cn