The strong recovery of the tourism industry comes from the coordination and cooperation of resources among all parties in the industry. As a one-stop tourism service enterprise, Ctrip is also constantly exploring ways to collaborate and coexist.
At this year's Ctrip Global Partner Summit, the five business segments under Ctrip jointly pointed to a core - how to continue sustainable development with the industry while tourism enters the fast lane?
1、 Go to sea! Driving towards internationalization
Ctrip Business Travel Releases "Global Influence Plan"
Nowadays, more and more companies are marking overseas markets as potential profit growth points, leading to an increase in cross-border business travel behavior. Ctrip Business Travel has also witnessed a strong growth in demand for overseas business travel: this year, the demand for overseas hotel orders increased by 365% year-on-year, the demand for overseas air tickets increased by 587%, the growth of overseas ground transportation exceeded 15 times, and the number of monthly active overseas users for business travel increased by 118%.
Relying on the digital solutions accumulated in the domestic market and accurately adapting to the local user habits of various regions and countries overseas, Ctrip Business Travel has begun to form its own competitive advantage to feed back the international TMC industry. Faced with the global blue ocean market of 1.3 trillion US dollars, Ctrip Business Travel has officially launched the "Global Influence Plan".
Zhang Yong, CEO of Ctrip Business Travel, introduced that "we will build a development system where global partners grow together, as well as our TMC peer empowerment strategy, to create more diverse value and provide personalized support for our customer partners, supply chain partners, ecological partners, and peer partners in various aspects such as technology, services, resources, and payments
With the rapid recovery of the global aviation industry, both civil aviation passenger volume and passenger capacity have approached the level of 2019, while domestic air tickets have exceeded the level of 2019.
Due to the backlog of demand in the entry-exit market, growth is expected during the recovery of flight capacity. Among them, the supply chain and users are the cornerstone of competition and the key to success or failure. Tan Yudong, CEO of Ctrip Group's air ticket business unit, believes that Trip.com has effectively played a role as a bridge and platform, empowering domestic suppliers to go overseas and also connecting with more international suppliers to serve Chinese customers.
There will be many challenges in the journey of enterprise globalization, and Ctrip's accumulated technology and service experience in the domestic market will also lay a solid foundation for enhancing its international competitiveness.
It is understood that in the direction of innovation, Ctrip provides a fuzzy search function for domestic and global flight inspiration, customized charter flight services, and itinerary splicing products, allowing users to enjoy more convenient travel and high-end services at better prices and high-quality booking experiences. The exploration of generative AI applications has gradually expanded in the fields of tourism and air tickets. In addition to the relatively mature customer service capabilities, AI has achieved significant efficiency improvements in aviation information processing, interface interaction, and marketing.
2、 Efficient Empowerment of Users and Industry Lifecycle
Ctrip Hotel Launches "Success Assistance" Plan to Empower the Life Cycle of Hotels with High Efficiency
As the Chinese market, which accounts for about one-third of the global hotel market, the huge supply and the return of potential customers undoubtedly boost confidence in the global tourism industry. However, starting from the third quarter, the "excess recovery" trend in the Chinese market gradually returned to the new normal, and the hotel industry began to enter the era of "rational prosperity".
How can platform companies and hotel merchants still experience an upward curve in performance after the wave of retaliatory growth has passed?
In addition to implementing the strategy of "jointly managing user lifecycle and focusing on empowering hotel lifecycle" proposed last year, Ctrip Hotels launched the "Assisting Success" plan this year, working together to create a more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient industry ecosystem by exploring emerging markets, deepening user experience, empowering efficient tools, and ESG sustainable development.
From the perspective of specific measures, starting from the first step of inspiring the hotel reservation industry chain, Ctrip has used intelligent methods such as gathering billions of databases of rankings and inquiries to capture fresh and reliable travel trends and awaken users' travel needs; Further enhance the user booking experience through measures such as shopping carts, upsell, and payment scheme optimization; During and after the trip, users can further increase their discounts and repurchase opportunities through theme room product upgrades, joint membership, and premium clubs.
Ctrip Tourism: Reconstructing the Logic of Goods Based on the Service Thinking of "People" as the Core
The recovery of tourism is not simply a return to the past. The past three years have been a trial and error, and have also stimulated innovation in the tourism industry. The form of domestic travel is gradually fragmented, and fragmented resources have become an emerging pillar. Data shows that the fragmentation of Ctrip Tourism and the proportion of revenue from similar free travel businesses have significantly increased. The number of domestic tour guides has increased by 240% compared to 2019; The inventory of rental vehicles increased from 11000 in 2019 to 146000 in September 23, a year-on-year increase of over 1200%; The number of customized games for fragmented resources has increased by 30% compared to 2019, and the size of Ctrip's customization team has exceeded 30% in 2019.
With the further opening up of outbound tourism, the emerging pillar of fragmented tourism industry will expand from China to the world. Behind this type of industry is closely linked to personalized talents. As far as the platform is concerned, it is our mission to continuously seek ways to break through the homogenized competition in the stock market, use a service mindset centered on 'people', and reconstruct our product logic, "said Jiang Hao, CEO of Ctrip Tourism Group.
In order to expand the supply of high-quality tourism service talents, Ctrip has imported a large number of outstanding young university talents into the industry through Ctrip Tourism College. Collaborate with universities and suppliers to establish an industry education alliance, establish a job certification system, and further connect the talent empowerment and employment loop. While increasing reserves, and taking into account the personalized and diverse needs of users, carefully select experienced personnel for suitable positions in some positions that require segmentation capabilities, such as customization engineers. For example, I used to be an educator who provided parent-child families with educational and recreational travel options; Formerly a nursing worker, providing professional travel services for silver haired individuals.
Ctrip also leads "people" to higher industry standards by building a tour guide library and displaying tour guide information on order details pages. Strive to create authentic and vivid service business cards, and better connect and approach users through the bridge of "people".
Three major models promote the digital and intelligent upgrading of tourism marketing
In terms of tourism marketing, Ctrip has released three major models: intelligent product selection, explosive product strategy, and destination strategy, further promoting the digital and intelligent upgrading of tourism marketing.
The intelligent product selection strategy is based on user needs and market competition, starting from the dimensions of hotels, room types,+X projects (hotels+catering, shuttle machines, etc.), pricing, etc., to select and incubate popular products. As of now, Ctrip has provided packaging pricing suggestions for over 5000 merchants, with over 10000 SKUs packaged, and an additional 20% increase in GMV for marketing pallets.
The explosive strategy is based on user profiles, business data, market data, etc., to develop marketing rhythms, marketing tools, and channel strategies, achieving twice the result with half the effort. Hong Kong Disneyland applied Ctrip's marketing strategy model, achieving a GMV of over 43 million and a total exposure of over 300 million.
The destination strategy is based on "measurement factors" such as activity budget, user profile, and booking trends, to develop an overall strategy for the destination that includes revenue benefits, marketing strategies, fan growth, and increased popularity, achieving "both good and good". The "Shuiyun Jiangsu 100 Live Streams" event jointly created by Jiangsu Culture and Tourism and Ctrip has a total exposure of over 140 million, directly driving 507000 tourists and driving tourism consumption of 110 million.