The language barrier discourages Chinese from travelling independently, Ctrip claims
Ctrip has teamed up with Baidu, the Chinese search engine, to provide a new translation service for Chinese tourists abroad.
Using Baidu’s “optical character recognition” (OCR) technology, tourists can translate English content into Chinese by taking a photograph of the text via the Ctrip app. The service is said to be more accurate than inputting characters manually.
According to a report by the China Tourism Academy and Ctrip, more than 62 million mainland Chinese travelled abroad in the first half of 2017, up 5% year-on-year.
More than half (58%) of these were independent travellers, while 42% were on group tours. The language barrier is one of the main reasons that tourists choose group tours, according to Ctrip.
