Online booking Travel Market vast entrepreneurs still have room for development

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The heat of online tourism can be glimpse from two huge investments in the first half of last year. May 16, 2011, the internet giant Tencent to the art dragon injection of 84.4 million U.S. dollars, a stake in the art Dragon 16%, become the second largest art dragon shareholder. Shortly thereafter, June 24 Baidu announced to travel vertical search site to where to invest 306 million of dollars, become the first major institutional shareholders.

With this corresponding, NetEase, Alibaba, Tencent and other major companies also launched their own travel products booking services. Other tourism vertical sites such as cattle, with the network, donkey mother, leisurely, travel more and other sites have been the attention of the capital. For a while, online tourism focused on the outbreak of gold miners poured in, and Ctrip, art and other traditional online travel agency (OTA) model is facing the challenges of new players.

Changbin, vice president of capital today, told global entrepreneur that tourism itself is a big market, in addition to the existing online tourism business, the traditional travel agency business still has a lot of not online, there is a huge space for imagination. According to Morgan Stanley analysts, Ctrip has accounted for more than half of the market in online travel bookings, but currently only 3% per cent of China's Internet users subscribe to travel services online.

While travellers have more choices about tourism products, they still need to be satisfied with their travel-related information needs. The distributors of tourism products rooted in the gene of e-commerce seem to have seen no breakthrough in providing rich information and creating communities. At the same time, more and more users are connected to the mobile internet, so the mobile phone this natural travel portability tool has become a number of online travel service providers need card location.

Different from business travellers, travelers, in addition to air tickets, hotels and other relatively standardized travel products booking, the destination also has a more diversified and more in-depth information needs, these are not already have ctrip, such as the focus of the site to provide the dragon. Extending to more upstream travel information Services is a natural choice to run a community and retain users, not just the ticket price war.

The community is not a blank market. In the industrial chain of specialization, there are many traveller community focused on this, providing travel plans, Raiders, travel notes and other information sharing. Before the advent of the internet's fiery SNS, blogs and microblogging models, they were built out of interest and personal needs, early in the form of forums, gathering a large number of travel enthusiasts, and have established a discussion and sharing atmosphere. Recently, as the online tourism market broke out, many traveller communities have started to speed up, one example.

The travel community, Chen Yu, was founded in 2006 by the Lu Gang and his friend, both of whom were interested in traveling. CEO Chen Yu to the location of the MA Honeycomb is "new tourism media." Ma Honeycomb has a community shape, but not purely in the community's way to do, the core products of the MA Honeycomb is the travel strategy. "The community is our gener, is our platform foundation, all the information is from UGC (user creates content), the introduction road book characteristic is actually a tool, the tool threshold is low." We are a community based on the tools, made of services. "Chen Yu revealed.

The introduction of the MA Honeycomb is designed to create a list of tourist destinations and routes using Wikipedia as a way to absorb the excellent content created by users. Rely on users to continue to organize and enrich, modify, and ultimately provide users with access to the destination and line as the unit of the Road Book Editor Update, provided to users to download, It is like the electronic version of the Guidebook, which conforms to the user's habit of obtaining information.

Last October, the number of leeches has grown to more than 2 million, gaining $5 million trillion in capital today and a $2 million interest-free loan. The money will be used to expand the mobile Internet layout, expand the online market, and motivate users to create content. But at the moment, the leech is not in a hurry to profit, in the development of user scale stage.

It is not just the vertical communities that are bullish on the market, but also the big internet companies that are apparently eyeing the field. In addition to investment in tourism products online distributors, they are also joined in, such as Baidu launched Baidu Tourism, Sina launched from the tourist site, hoping to use their own existing search or focus on the advantages of the user to stay in their own community.

On the mobile side, the smartphone has the characteristic of being portable and can provide the geographical location, which is more flexible to the users in the travel information inquiry and the travel product reservation. Traditional online travel agency website Ctrip, art dragon, travel search engine where to go and Taobao travel and so on are landing mobile application market, occupy the user's mobile phone. As an extension of the existing business, Ctrip, Art Dragon and where to go in the mobile end of direct competition, to provide standardized air tickets, hotels, tourism products search, booking and other services, in a short period of time, the home is not much different from mobile applications can not change the market pattern.

However, the size and growth of the market itself gives the start-up company a certain space. New entrants Beijing Vigor Day Sinks Technology Co., Ltd. took different ideas. Energy Day Exchange has two products, Flight Butler and hotel housekeeper, vice President Xu Hongyun said that, to a certain extent, the flight Butler is not doing online travel, its positioning is not to do ticketing, but a service provider travel users mobile Internet applications, business travel user groups have the characteristics of frequent travel, resulting in a variety of relevance to tourism. The flight Butler does not sell the ticket, does not have the very mature ticket company competition, but according to the user demand, provides the scene type information Inquiry service, for instance the flight dynamic inquiry, the boarding gate navigation, the weather inquiry and so on. Product design concept is to help users quickly decision-making, provide convenient and efficient information inquiry services.

"In the future, the flight Butler will consider extending the line, not only to provide information services, but also to extend the service to meet the personalized needs of users in various scenarios, such as providing taxi and car rental information to business travellers who arrive at the airport late at night." "Xu Hongyun revealed.

Although the field of online tourism has ctrip, art dragons and where to go to the old and new giants, however, for entrepreneurs to avoid their sharpness, there is still room for development. And in the two big trends of community and mobility, the players are still the speed, after all, these field giants can easily enter.