This article comes from the WeChat public account: Global Travel News (ID: Traveldaily) , author: TD, from FIG title: IC PHOTO
The epidemic has impacted the world and profoundly affected economic development. In such an environment, many tourism companies have adopted a contraction strategy to ensure cash flow. Many startups are struggling, and their primary goal is to survive.
However, C2B’s reverse hotel reservation platform, My Travel and My Stay, announced at this node that it had invested 10 million yuan in the strategic investment in graphene air purifier R & D manufacturer Oxygen Bar on February 17.
Oxygen Bar No. 1 financing history (screenshot self-check)
Our founder Huang Huimin said in an interview with Pencil Road: “This year is indeed a challenge for many entrepreneurs, but under the cold winter of capital, some unqualified startups can be eliminated and some Ability, ideas, and ideal people start business and grow, and brew the best investment opportunities. This year’s industrial Internet is an investment opportunity. “
According to the report by Pencil Road, during the epidemic, in order to ensure that the company can survive 9-12 months of healthy cash flow, we made this investment.
According toIt is reported that our business and accommodation have never announced that it has made a profit. The latest financing was made two years ago. What did the company rely on to make money? What is the status quo?
“C2B mode” was questioned
Wuhangwosu was established in May 2016. Its self-proclaimed booking model is similar to “Didi”. It is based on geographical location-based user pricing, and the hotel performs dynamic price adjustments to grab orders. The user then chooses to trade independently.
According to public information, the C2B model adopted by our company is a business model born in the era of Internet economy. The characteristic of this model is that consumers first put forward demand, and then production enterprises organize production according to demand.
In the travel industry, the C2B model was first applied by Priceline.com (now part of the Booking Group) . In 1998, Jay Walker founded Priceline in the United States and launched the “Name Your Own Price” business, which focuses on the C2B model.
The specific process of Priceline ’s C2B model is: the user reports the selection of star rating, city area, check-in and check-out dates and fills in the budget bid and completes the payment. The hotel bids through the Priceline platform at the back end. The order, order and hotel information will be sent to the guest, and the guest will not be able to cancel the reservation after receiving the confirmation, and Priceline’s revenue comes from the difference between the consumer’s bid and the hotel’s bid.
In fact, this “customized on demand” C2B model rarely has successful companies in the tourism industry. Priceline.com terminated the ticket and car rental business in C2B mode in 2016 and 2018, respectively. These moves are understood by industry insiders as they gradually withdraw from the stage of C2B.
According to Skift, more and more travelers are used to determining the itinerary at the last minute, and they are used to finding hotels quickly. No patience to submit requirements, waiting for confirmation or resubmission of requirements. In the market environment where mobile applications have become mainstream, consumers such as HotelTonight can easily obtain discounted hotel prices. This has caused a serious impact on the “Name Your Own Price” hotel booking model.
Someone in China has tried this C2B model. In 2011, Qunar launched this model into the local market, and launched a reverse auction model hotel reservationThe channel was “jailbroken”, but then I no longer see the channel on the official website. According to Global Travel News, Ctrip also launched the C2B model “Tonight’s Snapshot” on the hotel channel in 2014, which features a combination of tail auction and reverse pricing, but the project also disappeared invisible.
Ctrip’s Tonight Capture Function
On the homepage of our bank, there are four options: hotel, rush order, travel, and special topic. According to relevant persons in our bank and hotel, both “hotel” and “snatch” are in C2B mode. From the page, the style of our travel and accommodation is very similar to that of Priceline. All users report the selection of star rating, city area, check-in and check-out dates, and fill in the budget bid. Reservations can be achieved on the search results page.
Screenshot of My App Store
The reporter tried to make a reservation in our hotel and accommodation, selected the location on the hotel channel on the homepage, filled in the check-in, check-out time and bid, and clicked on the search results page to make the reservation. When the reporter changed the price to 200, 180, and 160 yuan, the number of hotels that showed the conditions would decrease accordingly. , but the price of the same hotel has not changed.
The C2B model created by Priceline, the core of which is “opaque”, translated into “opaque” in Chinese, means that after the user fills in the hotel star, city area, check-in and check-out dates and bids, etc Knowing which hotel took the order last, and it is not clear what the specific bid of each hotel is, so that consumers can directly compare prices with other platforms, and avoid the problem of hotel pricing differences in different channels.
But the C2B model that targets Priceline is obviously very different. My trip is more like the search logic of OTA, which filters out hotels that meet the consumer’s price range. Such a function that only needs to pass the price filter bar is packaged as a “C2B” model by our trip. In addition, on the search page, we do not stay “opaque” like Priceline, but show the hotel name and price.
The reporter randomly called a number of hotels in Beijing and Guangzhou displayed on the My Travel App, and the response was “No cooperation with My Travel, please make a reservation through other platforms.” At the same time, the reporter inquired whether the relevant persons of several hotel groups would cooperate with our travel and accommodation, and the responses were “I have not heard of our travel and accommodation”, “I don’t know this company”.
In order to verify whether our travel is still in normal operation, the reporter booked the exquisite double bed room of Meiye Boutique Hotel on March 27 in our travel app. The price of our travel platform is 147 yuan, while the price of Ctrip is 130 yuan.
Screenshot of my travel app
The reporter then contacted the above hotel. The hotel immediately replied that the reporter had not heard of the platform of our travel and accommodation, nor received the relevant order. After a few minutes, after confirming the name of the booking guest, the hotel responded that After receiving the order, the order comes from Ctrip. ”
This may mean that we are connected to Ctrip’s system, and we are only a distributor of Ctrip, but the hotel and we are directly cooperating, how can we achieve low-cost orders on the platform? In addition, according to the hotel owner, their price for the day was not 147 yuan, but 104 yuan. The order number received was different from the order number of the reporter who placed the order in our bank, but in the end the reporter successfully presented the ID card at the hotel Check in.
It is difficult to develop a house
As a hotel reservation platform, only when there are a lot of houses and the prices are competitive enough will it attract more people to use the App. But in the past four years since its establishment, it has shown performance in terms of house expansion Not outstanding.
On March 28th, in our travel app, the reporter changed the location to the central location of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities, and set the acceptable price to 5,000 yuan. There are 7, 128, 12, and 76 hotels that can be booked. Under the same conditions, on April 5, there were 40, 96, 70, and 62 hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen respectively; on April 9, there were 53, 126, 78, and 74 hotels in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen respectively. .
According to the China-Waidu-China National Affiliate Partnership Program, it has 300,000 homes in 4 cities from North to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and it is still expanding across the country, and is cooperating with more than 1,500 hotels. According to the introduction, there are now at least 375 hotels in each city, but from the search results, it seems that our travels and accommodations have not made much progress in expanding the listings in recent years.
In addition, the download status of the App Store seems to be unsatisfactory. According to Qimai data, the ranking of the highest downloads in the App Ranking in the past three months is <1span class = "text-remarks" label = "Remarks"> (IOS system) for 1,144. By comparison, Ctrip and Feizhu are 54 and 75 respectively.
Go to court with an associate
It is reported that in order to openTo expand housing, we have launched a “joint venture model”. At present, we do not see relevant information on the official website of our bank, but we have published the article “Our Bank and Our National Joint Partnership Program” on the website of Tianjiu Sharing Holdings Group.
Our registered company is Guangzhou Yihan Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Guangzhou Yihan) , the company ’s major shareholder One is Beijing Jiuzhong Enterprise Management Consulting Co., Ltd., which belongs to Tianjiu Sharing Holdings Group.
According to the official website of Tianjiu Sharing Group, it was founded in 1991 and is the largest unicorn accelerator in China. It has 8 major business groups, more than 100 wholly-owned companies and holding companies in 40 cities around the world, and Has more than 6,000 employees and more than 800 professional investment talents. There are more than 300 unicorn companies and quasi-unicorn companies that are accelerating.
self-check screenshots
The joint venture model of our bank and our hotel refers to the joint venturer who pays a certain amount of equity funds at a time and becomes a local push of our bank and our hotel after training to help them access hotel resources and ultimately receive dividends. According to the “Our Bank and Our Country’s National Joint Partnership Program”, the joint cities are divided into three levels according to the city level, that is, special-level urban districts and counties, provincial capitals and sub-provincial urban districts and counties, and other cities (by prefecture-level city) . The joint venture partners pay 200,000 to 500,000 yuan for the city’s exclusive joint venture equity at a time according to different city regional levels.
Associate partners need to introduce hotel resources to our hotel development and docking channel resources to the hotel; in the early stage, we only need to recruit a three-person team to start the local hotel negotiation business, and the headquarters will conduct unified training and guidance.
In terms of income, the article said that one-time investment of 200,000 to 500,000 yuan, urban platform transaction volume totaled 114-317 million yuan over three years, and urban partner income totaled 662-183.6 million yuan over three years.
Screenshot self-knowledge
And a post published in Zhihu by our bank said: “In September 2018, our bank welcomed a new dividend in more than 30 affiliated cities. As of the month, three consecutive dividends have been issued And the returns are stable. “
Is the affiliate really making money like this? A WeChat public account has an article “Why did I meet with the initiator of our bank’s accommodation project in court”, and the author Cai Nannan said that he was a city associate of our bank and said that he was informed of the bank Wosu won the investment of Xue Manzi and also won the investment of Tianjiu Sharing Group, which is known as “China’s largest unicorn enterprise accelerator”. He chose to believe and choose to be our associate.
Cai Nannan said: “During the two days of training, as a businessman, the career sensitivity told me that my business is a project without any commercial value and business prospects.” Cai Nannan believes that my business does not have any Internet. Technical support, just staying on the assumption of a business model. “There is only a business model invention application filed in April 2018. There are no technical invention patents and no official certification materials that can prove that the project has earned huge profits.”
“So I want to refund the 300,000 investment principal, but the other party is unwilling. In addition, I found that many investors did not get the principal back.”
Associates who want to withdraw are not alone. However, at the legal level, the joint venture’s judgment that “there is no business prospect, and will not make money in the future” is a subjective judgment. After signing the cooperation contract, the joint venture’s intention to get back the principal in advance is a violation.
Guangzhou Yihan went to court for a contract dispute with an associate. According to the China Judgment Documents Network, Guangzhou Yihan was the plaintiff in the above-mentioned case, suing our bank and our city’s exclusive joint venture partner Yue Ou Company withdrawing from the contract. After the court’s judgment, the major shareholder of the defendant company repaid the plaintiff Guangzhou Yihan compensation of 30,000 yuan and rejected the plaintiff’s other lawsuits.
It is worth noting that the reason for the defendant’s withdrawal from the contract was that “this project is riskier and requires withdrawal”. Moreover, in the relevant evidence issued by the defendant, it believes that our business is “there are false data and false propaganda in the project itself.”
In this regard, the relevant person in charge of our bank and my apartment said that there were few investors who questioned, and the article “Why do I meet with the initiator of our bank and my project in court” is out of nothing, subjective and conclusive. The company’s reputation caused losses. Moreover, our company won the lawsuit in the lawsuit with the author of the article.
Screenshots are provided by the person in charge
Formerly a star startup
Although the C2B model has been questioned, when our company was founded, it also received investments such as star investors Xue Manzi and Tianjiu Group, due to its project model matching Priceline’s C2B model. For a time, it attracted the attention and discussion of the industry. But in the past two years, not much has been heard.
History financing history (self-checking screenshots)
According to public information, it is not Huang Huimin ’s first entrepreneurial project. She founded the self-driving tour service company “Weiweiyou” in 2014. This project won 10 million yuan led by Xue Manzi in 15 minutes, which once became a hot spot in the circle. At present, Weiwei’s official website has not been found.
According to the company’s information, Huang Huimin has invested in many companies in recent years, of which 7 are legal representatives.
The reporter found that accept our bankThe registered company of Oxygen Bar No.1 invested by our hotel is Guangzhou Wanhan Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Guangzhou Wanhan) , Huang Huimin as a major shareholder Accounted for 65% of the company’s shares. Alibaba Cloud information shows that the domain name “yangbayihao.com” of Oxygen Bar 1 was registered on February 6, 2020, and the WeChat public account of Oxygen Bar 1 shows that its main body is Guangzhou Wanhan and the certification time is also February On the 6th, it was about 10 days before the announcement of investment in Oxygen Bar No. 1 on February 17th. Various indications indicate that Oxygen Bar No. 1 may already belong to Guangzhou Wanhan, and this investment looks like “left hand to right hand”.
Screenshot from Alibaba Cloud
Screenshot from WeChat public account
However, the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System shows that Guangzhou Wanhan has not had any relevant information about changes in shareholders or changes in the proportion of capital contributions in recent years. Why this 10 million investment did not appear in the change record is unknown.
Investigation of enterprises revealed that 21 of the related risk warnings appeared in many companies invested by Huang Huimin. Among them, the official website of Guangzhou Hanyuan Information Technology Co., Ltd. was reminded by the Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau of Liwan Branch that “there is a risk”; the legal representative of Guangzhou Wocai Information Technology Co., Ltd. and the main personnel of the enterprise were listed as untrustworthy persons; Min Information Technology Co., Ltd. is making a simple cancellation announcement; Huizhou Weiweiyou Information Technology Co., Ltd. is included in the list of abnormal operations.
The above screenshots are all from the company to check
What makes people feel weird is that the investment announced by our company at the media level, but it is difficult to find the relevant certification at the level of business information. Among them, according to the Golden Finance report, in 2018, Huang Huimin strategically invested in the blockchain solution service provider CompassX for the global high-end tourism industry. It matched the bidding method and packaged the appropriate tourism resources on the chain for hotels and homestays. , Travel agencies and other tourism supply chains and tourists provide a de-intermediation direct trading platform.
It is worth noting that the angel investor of CompassX is Xue Manzi. Blockchain has never lacked popularity, but according to Global Travel News, the biggest problem facing blockchain technology is the difficulty of landing.
According to public reports, in the middle of 2019, our bank and our company also acquired the equipment manufacturer “Smart Hotel Front Desk”. The “smart hotel reception” can use AI instead of manual. With this device, customers only need to swipe their ID cards to check in in 10 seconds and check out in 3 seconds.
No matter from what level, our business is a mysterious and controversial company. The C2B model that it advertises is simply a layer of skin on the OTA model, and it does not have itself. Supply chain procurement and management capabilities, how they sing this drama deserves our continued attention.
This article comes from WeChat public account: Global Travel Weekly (ID: Traveldaily) , author: TD < / p>