.
In October 2016, when Flying Pig just got this new name, Ali clearly defined its position as “mainly targeting young people to travel freely abroad.” This is a huge new market.
Like many of Ali ’s products, Flying Pig has also played a lot of concepts. It has successively launched services such as outbound supermarkets, future hotels, and future scenic spots, trying to change the old pattern of the industry with a new look.
In the high-end hotel market, Flying Pig also has many moves.
As early as 2016, Feizhu has begun to convey information to the high-end hotel industry. The main idea is that Feizhu is different from traditional OTAs and has lower commissions. Ali has traffic resources, membership resources and “future hotel capabilities”, even Have the ability to help high-end hotels pull new members and so on.
In October 2018, Zhang Yong, the then CEO of Ali, once again painted the blueprint of the flying pig, saying that “not interested in doing OTA” will continue the strategy of “let the world have no difficult business” and let platform merchants directly contact consumers. Empower businesses to benefit them.
From this perspective, Feizhu doesn’t seem to want to win much OTA market share, but wants to completely change the industry’s intermediary operation mode. Not to mention whether it will succeed, Flying Pig’s ambition to enter the tourism industry is considered great.
According to data from research firm Fastdata, in the first half of 2019, the market turnover of the OTA industry exceeded 700 billion yuan, of which Ctrip, which has eaten where, accounted for 55.7%; Flying Pig ranked second with 18.4%, Even more than the same Cheng Yilong, the latter accounted for 12.1%.
This record of 3 years of development is dazzling.
Considering Ctrip, Tencent, Ali behind Feizhu, and the expanding Meituan behind Tongcheng Yilong, the competition in the OTA industry is now much more brutal than it was four years ago. This is no longer a war of subversive innovation for rising stars to challenge the hegemony of the industry, but a battle in which BAT participates together and even directly jumps into the water to contain Ctrip, a leading player in the industry.
02 What about Ctrip?
Ctrip has been able to maintain its position as the industry leader for many years. The key person is of course Liang Jianzhang.
When Liang Jianzhang felt that he could not find his opponent with the telescope, he left Ctrip and went to study. When the mobile internet storm started in 2011 and Ctrip’s development crisis spread, he came back again and turned the tide.
Now, at the time, Ctrip was facing a dangerous situation: on the one hand, where ambitious platforms are going to be ambitious; on the other hand, the online travel market has changed a lot, and Yilong has regained its vitality under the leadership of Cui Guangfu Elong’s strategy is to focus on the hotel business and Ctrip, regardless of the rest, has already achieved some results.
After the return of Liang Jianzhang, the pace of the entire company is much faster than before. He quickly discovered a key problem-Ctrip, which already has tens of thousands of employees, had a big company illness and inefficient operations.The action on the mobile side is particularly slow.
In addition to accelerating the layout on the mobile side, Liang Jianzhang has done a few important things and successfully stabilized Ctrip’s Jiangshan.
One of these is a price war with Yilong.
Before this, Elong, under the leadership of Cui Guangfu, focused on the hotel business strategy with great success. By the beginning of 2012, Elong hotel reservations had reached half of Ctrip.
After Liang Jianzhang returned to Ctrip, Yilong shot first.
Ctrip first invested US $ 500 million in vigorous promotion to face Yilong. This price war caused Elong to lose a net loss of 33.1 million yuan in the third quarter of 2012. Although Ctrip’s profit also declined, Elong clearly paid a greater price.
A year and a half later, the two started again. Ctrip announced that it would offer 500 million yuan for profit promotion, and the two sides were bloody. Since then, Yilong intends to come to an end with Ctrip’s history of competing for the market. Since then, Ctrip has acquired shares in Yilong, and Yilong merged with Chengcheng and was incorporated into the “Ctrip Department”.
Liang Jianzhang’s return to Ctrip. The second major event was a large investment, mainly aimed at the booming tourism companies at the time.
In April 2014, Ctrip successively invested in Tongcheng and Tuniu, two companies that were favored by the capital market at the time: invested US $ 200 million to become the second largest shareholder of Tongcheng, accounting for 30% of the shares; invested 3000 Ten thousand US dollars to Tuniu, won a board seat.
Tongcheng and Tuniu are both OTAs focused on outbound travel products. Ctrip has entered this emerging market by acquiring shares in these industry-leading companies. It was also in 2014 that he heavily invested in a star company, which started the process of Ctrip’s continuous layout of the upstream and downstream industries and the global industrial chain.
The third big thing Liang Jianzhang did was to urge the merger of Ctrip and Qunar.
In this merger, Ctrip bypassed the company management negotiations with Qunar founder Zhuang Chenchao and chose to mediate with Qunar ’s major shareholder Baidu, and eventually won Qunar. Liang Jianzhang’s higher-dimension business operations capabilities are undoubtedly revealed. Looking back, how to deal with