China OTAs Ctrip and 17U just expanded their online presences onto Taobao Trip in the wake of eLong’s nesting on the travel booking service aggregator in the middle of this year.
The motivation for OTA to settle on Taobao Trip lied in not only the enormous user coverage but also the high quality e-commerce traffic. Meanwhile, the diversified demands of Taobao consumers will also be satisfied by the products and services provided by the OTAs. It seems to be a win-win game between Taobao and OTAs.
Li Xin from Taobao Trip pointed out that continuous improvement would be required as Taobao Trip is currently challenged with growingly diversified demand from mass users. Cooperating with different travel service providers could ramp up the line-up of Taobao Trip’s offering and eventually lead to a better ecosystem.
Taobao as of now has about 470 million users. More and more traditional agents are planning to speed up the online sales to a wider users group through Taobao platform.
The rise of e-commerce tourism is an irresistible trend with a roughly 200 billion RMB market, which draws the attention from not only the traditional OTA but also the major Internet companies.
Currently, consumers usually have to poke around a dozens of travel sites before finalizing their itinerary arrangement. With the further development of online travel market, many travel websites start to develop new types of service. Data shows that the annual transaction volume exceeded 10 billion RMB, and reached 10.9 billion RMB in 2011, with a year-on-year increase of 122%.
The piece was written by Zhou Kang, a BiMBA alumni.