From early Chinese international student to CEO of Asia’s largest online travel agency: Jane Sun’s rise

Established in 1999, the company operates a suite of platforms including Ctrip, Qunar, Trip.com and Skyscanner, linking travelers to more than 1.7 million hotels and over 600 airlines in more than 30 languages. It has tens of thousands of employees globally.

Compared with two decades ago, when Sun first joined, the company has been transformed under her leadership.

Born in Shanghai to chemical engineer parents, Sun was a law student at Peking University when China began opening up and she was selected to study at the University of Florida.

“I was among the first [main­land Chinese students] to go to the United States to study,” she recalls, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.

Though her parents were relatively comfortable in China, their income translated into little in U.S. dollars, so Sun had to support herself by taking on two jobs.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in accounting in 1992 and started her career as an auditor at KPMG before spending seven years at semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials.

Chief Executive Officer of Trip.com, Jane Sun, speaks at the Reuters NEXT Asia summit in Singapore July 9, 2025. Photo by Reuters

Sun joined Trip.com as chief financial officer in 2005, when the firm had a valuation hovering between $500 million and $1 billion and was working to gain recognition among U.S. investors.

“Few investors fully understood our potential, so I told the board we needed to prove ourselves—by building a strong reputation and becoming a respected global player,” Sun once shared, per Forbes Asia.

She later took on the role of chief operating officer in 2012 before being named chief executive in 2016, succeeding founder and executive chairman James Liang.

The agency’s profile rose in the years that followed, drawing increasing attention from investors as its position in the market solidified.

Now listed in both the U.S. and Hong Kong, the firm is worth around $50 billion.

Like most firms in the travel industry, Trip.com was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, especially during the 2020 Lunar New Year, when China’s lockdown wrecked many families’ travel plans.

“All of a sudden, they couldn’t go anywhere. And immediately, they demand a refund,” Sun recounted in a 2021 interview with The Business Times. “Although we already gave all the money to hotels, airlines, our partners (and) hadn’t got our refund back, we had to quickly make the decision to really take care of our customers.”

Despite the strain on cash flow, the company chose to prioritize customers and refunded millions of yuan (1 million yuan = US$144,700) to customers.

“That was very difficult, because if we do not have sufficient funding, it will be very difficult for us to sustain our operations,” she said.

Amid the uncertainty, Sun opted to forgo her own salary while ensuring that customer service staff continued to be paid in full.

Sun, now 57, was credited by CNBCwhich recently named her among its 2026 Changemakers list, with delivering a 60% year-over-year growth in bookings across Trip.com’s portfolio brands.

Notably, the firm’s international bookings reached 120% of pre-Covid levels and its shares have more than doubled since the pandemic.

Behind her success, Sun runs a tight daily schedule that stretches from early morning to late at night. Between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., she starts with a review of documents before moving on to back-to-back meetings with staff, partners, customers and industry players until 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., according to a 2023 interview with Tatler Asia.

Afterward, she goes home for dinner with her family, which includes her husband John Wu—a fund manager and former Alibaba chief technology officer—and their two children. She also spends time with the children before they go to sleep.

Her day does not end there. She works with the U.S. and European markets before getting just three to four hours of sleep.

“My schedule is very demanding,” she said in the interview. “But my kids see how hard I work. I want to be a good role model for them so, someday, if they decide to be working mothers, they know it’s difficult, but they know it can be achieved.”

She acknowledges that balancing work and family comes with challenges, and that working mothers often have to devote far more time and energy to both.

“But the good thing is we also get rewarded twice—not only are we going to have a happy family, but we also have a good career,” she noted.

And when it comes to challenges at work, Sun believes that “if you work very hard and look for opportunities, you will be able to find and create a lot of opportunities.”