It is not uncommon for e-commerce to do tourism, but Pinduoduo may have to deal with the two rivals of Ali and Meituan at the same time in the new battlefield.
Pinduoduo is brewing a new story about online travel.
I found that Pinduoduo has recently launched on the App and applet train ticket business. The entrance is located in Pinduoduo. Home——Recharge Center——Train Tickets . Click on it and the page will display the entrance name “TOTO Train Ticket”. Pinduoduo gave two new 5 yuan free tickets to new users.
In addition to the quick entry of the “Top-up Center” on the homepage, Pinduoduo has also set up a separate entry for Duoduo under the recharge subsection of the search channel; after clicking the travel entry to enter the “Duoduo Travel” page, You can see the “Train ticket is online! If you don’t tie it up, you will successfully pay for the seat!”
On September 20th, Global Travel News released Duoduo invites travel merchants to settle on the platform. can publish information on three major categories of products: travel routes / commodities / services, attraction tickets / perimeter tours, special hotels / inns / apartments. But when verifying to Pinduoduo, the other party denied the news.
It is now less than three months after the entrance of travel trips and train tickets have appeared in the Pinduoduo App, announcing the determination of Pinduoduo to reach the online travel market.
If you do n’t make any money, you have to do the train ticket business first
Ali has flying pigs, and JD has JD.com.Yes, it is not uncommon for e-commerce to do tourism.
Whether it is an e-commerce travel business or Ctrip, Tongcheng Yilong and other vertical OTA platforms, train tickets + air tickets are almost standard on online travel platforms . As a latecomer, after the opening of the tourism section of Pinduoduo, the train ticket business was quickly launched, keeping pace with the industry. But in fact, Neither train tickets nor plane tickets are profitable businesses.
The train ticket business has almost no entry barriers, and each has obtained authorization from the railway company’s only official ticketing platform, 12306. For the travel platform, train tickets are the basic business, which is equivalent to the external entrance of 12306; For 12306, in fact, users are more expected to book tickets on their own platform. But even if the 12306 platform construction has been gradually improved and stabilized, it may not be able to be carried due to excessive traffic, especially during the holidays. The surge in traffic may cause the server and backbone network load to be over-core and too late to complete requests. As a result, the server crashed.
So 12306 I still choose to open it to the three-party platform to divert traffic. But the bottom line is that no one can get a commission deduction point. An OTA industry source told me, Flight ticket commissions are 2 to 3 points, while train tickets are completely 0 commissions and do not make money.
Even if you ca n’t make any money, the online travel platform is still firmly connected to the train ticket and hotel business. The reason is to divert your platform. The prerequisites for the travel platform to provide users with domestic travel, outbound travel, and accommodation services are that users first purchase destination transportation tickets and attract users to provide services from the booking stage. Makes users logically continue to stay on the platform to choose travel products; improve transportation ticketing, and prevent users from being lost to other platforms due to the lack of service links.
A case is the short-term rental platform Airbnb, which hired former Virgin America CEO and former Delta President Fred Reid as head of global transportation business in February this year, and began to innovate in aviation and ground transportation. The business logic is to control the traffic entrance upstream of the accommodation scene.
Look at Pinduoduo. Although it has huge traffic, it has not cultivated the user habit of purchasing travel products on the Pinduoduo platform. Cut from train ticket serviceIt is a good idea to let users have the consciousness that they can buy train tickets even if they fight a lot, and then guide the consumption of other tourism products.
It’s not hard to find. Compared with “Toto Travel”, Pinto to give more traffic to “Toto Train Tickets” < / span> : Whether it’s an App or an applet, “TOTO Train Tickets” can be accessed through independent entrances under the top-up center and search section, while “TOTO Travel” is not obvious on the miniprogram Tourism category, You can only find the corresponding entry under the search section of App .
Pinduoduo’s new battlefield with Ali and Meituan
Train ticket and air ticket business do not make money, but travel vacations and accommodation reservations do.
Open the Pinduoduo App to see that the services currently provided by Duoduo Travel are mainly divided into four categories: domestic travel, outbound travel, attraction tickets and destination fun. Domestic outbound travel mainly organizes “X days X nights” group tours. Although the destination fun shows the slogan “Eat, Drink, Play and Fun”, it mainly provides passports, visa processing services, and sells phone cards and Internet access. card.
The outbound travel items provided by Pinduoduo mainly go to Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries, and Japan and South Korea, two East Asian countries. Match.
Toto Travel has called for businesses to settle in. At present, the platform model is adopted. is more similar to Flying Pig. According to previous reports from Global Travel News, the merchants on the Toto Travel platform need to pay a deposit of 10,000 yuan, and pay a fee of 6 ‰ per order (equivalent to the payment fee paid by Alipay and WeChat). The settlement cycle is automatically confirmed after receipt or Actively confirm T + 1 after receipt.
In the past year, Feizhu has continuously strengthened its platform attributes. Cooperate with many hotels to form a “New Travel Alliance”, to help suppliers become Internet-based. When talking about the development goals of Flying Pig, Xiaoyaozi bluntly said, Flying Pig is not interested in repeating an OTA, and does not want to make a new OTA at all, I still hope to be a good platform. This means that although Pingduo, which also adopts the platform model, is currently unpredictable, it will not be able to avoid competing directly with Feigou in the future to stage a competition for businesses.
Except for train tickets, Duoduo travel products are the same as Pinduoduo’s other products, which can be purchased separately or can be purchased at a lower price. The fission gameplay of tourism products added to social e-commerce not only has the e-commerce traffic advantage, but also is more sexy than the vertical OTA platform gameplay.
It’s not just flying pigs, the Pinduoduo travel business may have to deal with the new rival of Meituan.
Meituan ’s development strategy is no longer aggressive after listing. A large part of the reason is to treat Pinduoduo as a Pinning Ali’s “ally” : The momentum of Pinduoduo is fierce, and it is difficult for Ali to endlessly invest resources to cope with the competition of Pinduoduo and Meituan. Up until then, the pressure on the US Mission will be reduced. However, it is not known how much the pressure of Meituan can be reduced, but Pinduoduo may first cut away Meituan’s cake.
Toto Travel Platform Although there is no hotel accommodation Separately classified, but the only one on sale The hotel product “Cool buds and children members live any year”, but it has become Top1 in the explosion zone. This product is a cool buddy parent-child membership card. The unit price is 880 yuan, and the single purchase price is 1288 yuan. Members can enter 110 unlimited parent-child themed hotels in 74 cities across the country cooperating with cool buddies. The details page shows, The official cooperation channels of Kuya Parent-Child also include e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, JD.com, Beidian, and Yunji. This shows that although Pinduoduo has no signs of aggressively entering the hotel sector, The hotel business may still be within Pinduoduo’s range, and it will also face supplier disputes.
The platform model is lightweight and does not have much pressure on the supply chain. The profit model mainly relies on commissions. An industry source told me that The hotel business has a strong ability to make money, and the commission can be 10%. Public information shows that OTA giant Ctrip can