Text: Cao Qian

E-commerce is not a rare thing to do tourism, but pinduoduo may have to deal with ALI and meituan at the same time in the new battlefield.

A new story about on-line tourism is being developed for a lot of time. Krypton found that it's been a lot of short-term on-line train ticket business at the App end and the little program. The entrance is located on the first page of the spelling.

Except for the home page

To this pinduoduo related business director said, this service plug-in has been online for about two months,

On September 20, global tourism news released the platform for pinduoduo to invite tourists to settle in, which can release the information of three major products, namely, tourist route / goods / services, scenic spot tickets / peripheral tours, special hotels / Inns / apartment hotels. Before that, 36 krypton asked pinduoduo for official confirmation, which was also denied by the other side.

Now tourism travel and train ticket entrance have appeared in pinduoduo App, to a certain extent, announced the determination of the multi-slice online tourism market. For users, yes

If you don't make money, you have to do the train ticket business first

There are flying pigs in Ali and travel in Jingdong. It's not uncommon for e-commerce to travel.

Whether it is the travel business of ecommerce, or Ctrip, the vertical OTA platform such as Cheng Yilong, train tickets are almost standard for online travel platforms. As a latecomer, pinduoduo also quickly launched the online train ticket business after opening the tourism section, keeping up with the pace of the industry. But in fact, train tickets and air tickets are not profitable businesses.

There is almost no entry threshold for the train ticket business, and each of them is authorized from 12306, the only official ticket platform of the railway company. For the tourism platform, train ticket is the basic business, which is equivalent to the external entrance of 12306. For 12306, users are more likely to book tickets on their own platform, but even though the construction of 12306 platform has been gradually improved and stabilized, it may not be able to carry because of too many visits, especially during holidays, which may lead to the overload of servers and backbone networks And complete the request, so that the server crashes.

Therefore, 12306 still chooses to open to the three-party platform for diversion, but the bottom line is that no one can get the Commission deduction point. An OTA industry person told 36 krypton that the Commission for air tickets is 2 to 3 points, while for train tickets, the Commission is completely zero and no money is earned.

Even if you can't make money, online tourism platform is firmly connected to train tickets and hotel business, the reason is to drain its own platform. The preconditions for the tourism platform to provide services such as domestic travel, outbound travel and accommodation for users are that users first purchase the transportation tickets to the destination, and start to attract users to provide services from the ticket booking link, so that users can continue to stay in the platform to select tourism products; improve the transportation ticket business, and avoid the loss of users to other platforms due to the lack of service links.

One case is that airbnb, the short-term accommodation platform, hired Fred Reid, the former CEO of virgin American Airlines and the former president of Delta Airlines, as the head of global transportation business in February this year, and began to layout innovative businesses in aviation and ground transportation. The logic is to control the flow entrance upstream of the accommodation scene.

More and more, although there is a huge amount of traffic, it has not been trained to purchase the user's habits of the tourism products in the high-level platform. Cut through the train ticket service, let the user produce

It's not hard to find that

Pinduoduo and the new battlefield of Ali and meituan

The business of train tickets and air tickets is not profitable, but the travel, vacation and accommodation can be booked.

Opening pinduoduo App, we can see that the current services provided by many trips are mainly divided into four categories: domestic travel, outbound travel, scenic spot tickets and destination play. Main organizations of domestic outbound travel

The outbound tourism projects provided by pinduoduo mainly go to Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries, as well as two East Asian countries, Japan and South Korea. The price of tourists is low and most of them are hot money routes, which is consistent with the overall tonality of pinduoduo.

A lot of travel calls for businesses to enter, the current use of the platform model, and flying pigs are more similar. According to the previous report of the Global Travel News, the resident merchants of many travel platforms have to pay a deposit of 10,000 yuan, 6 per order.

In the past year, Flying Pig has continuously strengthened the attributes of the platform and joined forces with many hotels to set up

In addition to train tickets, like other products of pinduoduo, Duoduo travel goods can be purchased separately or at a lower price. Tourism products join the fission play of social e-commerce, which not only has the traffic advantage of e-commerce, but also is more sexy than the vertical OTA platform.

Not only flying pigs, pinduoduo's travel business may have to deal with meituan, a new rival.

Meituan's development strategy after listing is no longer radical, in large part because pinduoduo is regarded as holding back Ali.

Many travel platforms do not have a separate classification of hotel accommodation, but the only hotel goods being sold

The platform mode is light and light, without too much supply chain pressure, and the profit mode mainly depends on commission. A person in the industry told 36 krypton 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 extract 20% or even higher commission for some high-end hotels; for meituan, the liquor tourism business is the company's profit center, maintaining a high gross profit of about 90% for a long time.

Pinduoduo's layout of tourism business naturally focuses on its strong profitability. Although pinduoduo is willful enough to expand its business without any loss after going public, it has to sink into the long-term development of the company. The stock price has been hit hard by the unexpected results in the third quarter. In the eyes of the secondary market, the story of fighting for more loss for more growth may no longer be interesting.