Travel and leisure platform Meituan Travel received more than 18 million room nights of accommodation bookings in a single month in July, an increase of 50% year on year.
The volume of hotel bookings on Meituan Travel has been increasing steadily, thanks to the traffic flow channeled from the two service-focused platforms of Meituan-Dianping and Dazhong-Dianping. Meituan Travel users have reached nearly 100 million, and one out of every three room nights sold online is made on Meituan Travel’s platform.
Qing Guo, Meituan Dianping’s general manager of hotel accommodation division, believes that Meituan-Dianping and Dazhong-Dianping with the 600 million users collectively have been funneling traffic to Meituan Travel to boost the number users and the room nights on the platform. At the same time, he believes that hotels are improving in online marketing, personnel training and comprehensive income, supported by the platforms merchant empowering initiatives such as "CD Model”, " Meituan Hotel College" and "Hotel + Food".
As hotels need to elevate targeted marketing and precise operation to tap into the future of Internet application, Meituan Travel helps hotel merchants achieve greater cost-effectiveness by putting forward the "CD Model”, leveraging the strengths of the platform. “C” stands for cross selling, and “D” direct selling. The model means to help hotels manage customer sources and build a pool of high potential users, primarily in first- and second-tier cities and extending to three-and four-tier cities, and cross-sell to them hotel accommodation, food, entertainment and other activities, so as to achieve one-stop consumption and improve the overall income. Direct selling is intended to help hotels achieve autonomous and efficient management and to reduce costs.
"Meituan Hotel College" is the online-offline training platform launched by Meituan Travel to help enhance hotels’ online marketing capabilities. By combining online training of mobile Internet hotel experts and “golden managers” and offline open classes, it has already trained 18,000 graduates in over six months, contributing to the "Internet+" upgrading and transformation of China hotels.
At present, the number of available rooms on Meituan Travel is about 12.5 million, in high-star hotels, economy hotels, holiday hotels, love hotels, apartments, homestays, youth hostels, farmhouses and other types of accommodation. Mr. Guo believes that there is significent room to grow online booking for hotels, in the current China hotel market that registers about 2 billion room nights of bookings annually.
