Chinese Hotel Booking App Bingdian Grabbed Series A Round

Shanghai Didatour International Travel Service Co., Ltd, maker of several popular travel booking apps told TechNode that the startup has just completed its Series A round of financing invested by BlueRun Ventures. The money would go towards technology development and hotel partnership scheme.

The company has launched two well-received apps including “BingDian Jiudiankong (Hotel Master)” and “Jiudian Bingdianjia (Hotel Discounts)”. Hotel Master, once the startup’s flagship product totaled 500k downloads in the first 150 days after its debut in late March of this year. It also topped the travel chart of Apple’s China App Store for one week or so.

The app is amongst the first batch of Chinese adopters of the “priceline model” – aka “name your own price”. Users can set a target price for a hotel room and let hotels bid for the deal. In addition to this main feature, the old version of Hotel Master also integrates loyalty cards of top-end hotels, business traveler could make reservations directly from the app.

The two features are actually targeting at different user groups, the “name your own price” feature is more for price-sensitive customers while the latter one is more favored by business travellers who are usually less sensitive about price. So the team decided to split the app into two individual ones with sharpened focus, hence the birth of “Hotel Discounts” in early October of this year.

Just like many other travel booking apps, Hotel Discounts also makes profits by helping hotels get rid of supply overhang.