T-Bird, a Shenzhen-headquartered booking platform for customized outbound trips, recently announced it has acquired Shanghai Haiyou, a platform that consolidates car rental, hotels, activities and attraction reservation services.
Established in 2015, T-Bird specializes in customized outbound travel for Chinese travelers. It has developed a proprietary Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) solution offering a CRM (customer relationship management) for managing demand, a SAAS (software as a system) for route design and an ERP (enterprise resource planning) for taking orders to support travel suppliers, tailored travel designers in customer acquisition.
T-Bird has further optimized the platform operation and attracted nearly 100 brands to join in, some are closing 10 orders on the platform on a monthly basis. T-Bird also entered the hospitality industry last year – it is building a hotel, Migrant Manor, near Menton city of France, which is set to open next year.
Mr. Guozhu Liu, CEO of T-Bird, claimed Shanghai Haiyou was acquired to integrate resources and make the pie of customized travel bigger. He revealed that more potential acquisitions were in the works.
Shanghai Haiyou was launched in 2016 and specialized in cruise holidays when it first started. Haiyou then extended to the customized travel sector while expanding its team. It reported steady business growth in the last three years, with 10 million yuan of turnover for 2018 and another 10 million yuan for just the six months of 2019.
It was reported that the acquisition would complete in the near future, and Hiyou’s founder, Mr. Dong Han, would serve as a partner of the consolidated company, while the Hiyou team would be integrated with T-Bird’s. (Translated by Elena)
