Sohu and Qunar Team Up to Launch New Travel Service

BEIJING, Jan. 12 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Sohu.com (Nasdaq: SOHU) and Qunar.com, China's largest travel portal, announced the formation of a strategic partnership to better meet the information needs of Chinese travelers. Sohu.com and Qunar.com will jointly offer through Sohu's Sogou Map Service a new travel information site, providing a range of contextual advertising formats that allow advertisers such as airlines and hotels to better target consumers.

For the first time, Sohu's consumers will be able to search for thousands of discounted flights, hotels, packages and other travel options by utilizing Qunar-powered search technologies.

With an active user base of over 50 million Chinese internet users and over 10 million points of internet, Sohu.com's Sogou Map Service in partnership with Qunar will provide advertisers the necessary scale to reach China's "digital elite", one of the most affluent, tech savvy and sought-after demographic groups in the world's fastest growing consumer market.

Sohu's CTO, Wang Xiao Chuan, said, "Only the mash-up of Sohu's map platform with outstanding travel applications provided by Qunar will stand out to win the trust and favour of consumers in China. The cooperation of Sohu's Sogou Map Service with Qunar.com is in line with our "full-feature, full-service" strategy. From this day onward, consumers will be able to make a one-stop travel-related search, expediting their trip planning, feature evaluation and price comparisons."

Qunar's President, Zhuang Chen Chao, noted, "The partnership with Sohu's Sogou Map Service was only possible because both companies realize the potential impact of online bookings as the next growth driver for the travel industry in China. I believe that the future of search engines lies in enhanced information analysis and the collaboration between various travel service players to offer advertisers more relevant options to target the most highly qualified consumers. We are looking forward to a long-term and favorable partnership with Sohu."

Additionally, Wang Fushan, the Deputy Secretary of the China Electronic Chamber of Commerce, pointed out that users of internet map services can easily be directed to travel search web sites and thereby meet their ever-changing requirements. The business cooperation between Sohu and Qunar will be an example of a successful business collaboration that helps advertisers reach their ROI objectives.

About Qunar.com

Qunar.com is China's largest travel web site that focuses on providing the most comprehensive and accurate pricing information for travel services.

Launched in May 2005, Qunar has quickly become a top new media in China and is recognized as one of the "established stars" in the Chinese online travel space. The company generates 35 million UV's per month.

Qunar offers an audience that represents China's upwardly mobile new generation of consumers who are frequent travelers, comfortable with online transactions and willing to spend a significant amount of their disposable income on traveling to new and exciting places.

Qunar means "Where are you going?" in Mandarin Chinese. For more information, please visit http://www.qunar.com .

About Sohu.com

Sohu.com Inc. (Nasdaq: SOHU) is China's premier online brand and indispensable to the daily life of millions of Chinese, providing a network of web properties and community based/web 2.0 products which offer the vast Sohu user community a broad array of choices regarding information, entertainment and communication. Sohu has built one of the most comprehensive matrices of Chinese language web properties and proprietary search engines, consisting of seven leading web properties.

SOURCE Qunar.com