IHG® Announces Global Partnership with Alipay

 IHG® (InterContinental Hotels Group), one of the world’s leading hotel companies, has announced that it has signed a global partnership with Alipay, China’s leading third-party online payment solutions company. It makes IHG the first global hotel company to give Chinese guests the ability to pay via Alipay through all of IHG’s online and mobile channels, as well as across its full estate of hotels globally.

The new partnership, which has been agreed with Alipay’s parent company Ant Financial, will initially apply to IHG’s existing estate of more than 270 hotels in Greater China, as well as a number of hotels around the world that participate in IHG’s China Ready Programme, which offers a range of tailored services to Chinese travellers. The global roll-out of Alipay will begin in 2017.

The strategic partnership between IHG and Alipay will benefit Chinese Travellers who are visiting the GCC for both business and leisure. The latest figures released by Dubai’s Department of Tourism Commerce and Marketing indicates that 450,000 tourists travelled from China to Dubai in 2015. In addition, Abu Dhabi and Dubai are seeing high growth rates in tourist influx from China, especially during Golden Week and Chinese New Year. Year-to-date, IHG properties in the Middle East have recorded a 44% growth in the number of nightly room bookings from tourists from China on a year-on-year basis, in comparison with a 26% increase in 2015.

IHG was the first global hotel company to enter the China market more than 30 years ago and China is now its second largest market globally. The partnership will allow IHG to further capitalise on the significant increase in Chinese outbound travel. According to IHG’s Future of Chinese Travel Report published in 2015, nearly 90 million Chinese households will be able to travel overseas by 2023, fuelled by a growing middle class and increasing propensity to travel.