The tourism group represents a particular type of corporate group, comprising two or more enterprises which meet the demand of tourists. Viewed from an international perspective, the tourism group is a corporate conglomerate, in which member enterprises are linked by property rights, closely associated in commercial activities such as investment and financing, planning and accounting, product R&D, marketing, brand incubation, human resources development, etc., and coordinated in their actions to achieve the group’s overall strategic objective.

The tourism group is a natural result of commercial logic in the field of industrial organization. It is a complicated tourism corporate organization; its momentum stems from its internal coupling efficacy; and the boundary of its growth is defined by its escalating internal transaction costs.

In the past 30 years, Chinese tourism enterprises, along with the development of the national tourism, have navigated their way of conglomeration through difficulties and ups and downs. As the representative of advanced productive force in the tourism industry, the explorer of commercial innovations in tourism, as well as the undertaker of industrial missions, tourism groups not only play a leading role in the development history of China’s tourism industry, but also serve as the core and dominant element thereof, representing our “national team” in the international tourism competition. In the era of great development for our tourism industry, tourism groups serve as a major platform for the dual market of tourism demand and production factors and carry on  the dream of building our nation a great power of tourism.

Although the importance of tourism groups to the tourism industry is apparent, the present academic and industrial researches on tourism groups remain in a spontaneous stage, our knowledge about tourism groups is still inadequate, our homegrown experience and development mode have not been systematically sorted out and summarized, and there is still a lack of macro comprehension and theoretical guidance for the development of tourism groups.

Against such a background, we are called upon urgently by our times to review the past and look into the future, and summarize and sort out the historical process and current conditions of our tourism groups. To this end, China Tourism Association and China Tourism Academy jointly organized a tourism development forum and released the Report on the Development of China’s Tourism Groups based on relevant surveys. All of this was intended to drive the industrial development to a strategic height, grasp the nature of tourism groups, sort out the historical clues, summarize successful experience, offer suggestions for the conglomeration of China’s tourism enterprises, and cry out for the great development of the tourism industry.