Trip Advisor to add Chinese apprentice, the public comments formally entered the hotel tourism vertical area

Trip Advisor, the world's largest travel review website, added a "Chinese apprentice". Public comments announced officially entered the hotel tourism vertical area, targeting China's largest hotel information platform.

"Internet hotel industry is generally divided into OTA (online travel services) and hotel reviews two categories: OTA General will have more than, the domestic representative is Ctrip, art dragon, etc. for the latter, there will often be a similar Trip Advisor content Web site appears. "The public reviews CEO Zhang to reporters:" Make choices, make choices (the comments on the platform), will become the entire hotel industry chain of important entrance.

Before this, the public reviews also in its group buying business section involved in hotel reservation services, but did not add to the comments function. However, group buying in the overall hotel ordering market occupies a smaller proportion. Data show that the 2013 online Hotel subscription scale of about 62 billion yuan, the market about 43 billion yuan by OTA manufacturers divided, the United States group net occupy the market share of 70%, in the overall market share of only 2.8%.

To the standard trip Advisor, the general manager of the hotel business Yu Jianlin introduced, its hotel tourism reviews business will not directly with the online tourism business interface, but through the true comments of netizens, affect its hotel reservations, purchase. In other words, this is just a diversion portal, the actual booking business needs to jump to each independent Third-party platform to complete.

At present, the public reviews of the domestic hotel business has been connected Ctrip, art dragon, Green Mango and other suppliers, while the foreign hotel business with Agoda, booking and other hotel booking platform to complete.

Public comments on the "master" Trip Advisor is a global benchmark for tourism reviews, the original is Expedia's subsidiaries, after the split separate listing, with Trip Advisor and other 19 tourism media brands.

As of March 17, 2014, Trip Advisor has a subsite in 33 countries around the world, and its brand site offers worldwide coverage of 775,000 hotels, 550,000 vacation rentals, 2 million restaurants, 125 million comments and comments on 400,000 attractions worldwide 139,000 destinations. Its business model is to generate revenue from advertising, including Pay-per-click Revenue, display ad revenue, and list services advertising revenue.

As of March 24, the total market value of trip Advisor was 13.879 billion U.S. dollars. According to its 2013 earnings, 2013 annual income reached 944.7 million U.S. dollars, the annual number of independent visitors more than 2 billion.

Relying on Word-of-mouth reviews to improve product transformation mode, whether in the tourism industry or the entire Internet field is not the first. Why doesn't China have a real trip advisor so far?

In Zhang's view, the biggest reason is related to the consumption behavior of the hotel customer base; With the upgrade of Chinese consumption, the demand of leisure hotels is more and more developed, and the requirement of hotel quality must be improved.

In short, the user's key decision-making information, in addition to hotel prices, poi information, as well as hotel facilities and other information; For a very rich user of travel experience, more or less will have some bad travel experience, real use experience will be more helpful to his decision. And people generally think that third-party user evaluation credibility is relatively high, users will use this as the key information for decision-making.

In fact, as a "master", Trip Advisor has already entered China. Trip Advisor to the Chinese carrier to the web in April 2009 online; in October 2009, Trips Advisor acquired a cool network of Chinese tourism search engines. However, despite the expectations of the Chinese version of Trip Advisor, the development of the net in China is somewhat tepid.

A hotel reservation the founder of the app believes that to the net Copy foreign mode, unavoidably acclimatized; the public comments larger competitors are not "master", but "brother": Relying on Ctrip tourism industry chain Resources of Ctrip strategy community.

Ctrip strategy Community has been online for more than 1 years, within the Ctrip is also targeted Chinese version trip Advisor. At the beginning of this year, according to the data published by Ctrip, its Ctrip strategy community already has a concentration of attractions, restaurants, shopping near millions reviews, except for the 80% of scenic spots, catering, shopping, entertainment, etc. first reached 20%.

"First of all, our attitude with OTA is open cooperation." "For the community with Ctrip and other similar products competition, public comment an executive told reporters that the public comments have a large number of comments on the habit of" user pool ", which is one of the biggest advantages; Secondly, because the public comments do not involve the back-end of OTA business, that is, not directly signed the hotel, so as to ensure that the user evaluation of the Independent , so that the comments information more effective.

However, the problem of public comments is how to put the existing stock customers, nearly billion monthly active user resources, the introduction of new hotel tourism business. After all, there is a big difference between the two consumption patterns of hotel travel and catering bookings.

In Yu Jianlin's view, this is a historical continuity of the problem, because there was no effort to do hotel business, many people are still inherent in the use of habits. People often go to the local only to use the public comments, and inquires the hotel information and booking before this has been completed.

This year, first let users know that the public comments can check the hotel information, the user transformation. Yu Jianlin said that in China alone, public comments have included more than 300,000 hotels and other types of accommodation information, but in other OTA sites can only see their own 50,000 ~10 million "point of interest" data, "the big trend is to have the largest ' interest point ' information and rely on consumer evaluation to the most convenient for users, The most abundant consumer guide platform can get more traffic. ”

"OTA competition has been quite white-hot, hotel reviews platform in China or a blue ocean. "The hotel category app entrepreneur believes that in the general trend of O2O, regardless of the public comments or Ctrip want to rob the opportunity; compared with the model of Trip Advisor," Chinese Apprentice "users, data scale is still too small, there are similar profit patterns and many other dilemmas to be solved;" The first thing to accumulate user traffic, Keep the product alive. ”