Hotel direct sales service provider Honey Guide has secured tens of millions of yuan (more than USD 1.5 million) in its latest financing round. The round was led by Weimob, China’s leading business intelligence SaaS service provider listed in Hong Kong.
The proceeds will be used for R&D of digital technologies and improvement of operational services, to expand the company’s leading position in promoting hotel and travel companies to go digital with sustainable management.
Founded in 2015, Honey Guide focuses on digital marketing for hotels and destination lifestyle enterprises, building SCRM (social customer relationship management) ecosystem for its clients and providing one-stop services of personalized and modular technology development and operation.
Honey Guide has so far developed digital marketing and operational service solutions for thousands of international and domestic hotels in southern, eastern and southwestern China, including upscale brands such as Atlantis, InterContinental, Hyatt, Hilton, Wanda and OCT.
In 2020, Honey Guide helped its partners survive the pandemic and even achieve significant growth. In nearly a hundred matured individual hotels that Honey Guide served, average annual GMV topped RMB 5 million (USD 768,000) last year. Honey Guide has also become a major third-party service provider for WeChat Mini Programs. By applying digital solutions developed by Honey Guide, some merchants had tripled or quadrupled their transaction values in WeChat, accounting for 15% or even 30% of their total transaction values.
Honey Guide CEO Xun Lin said that the primary driving force for the growth of the hotel and travel industry in the post-pandemic era lies in the digitization and operation of SCRM.
After the financing round, Honey Guide will double down on the midscale and upscale hotel markets, help enterprises achieve digitization and set up their SCRM system. As an SCRM-based platform in WeChat, Honey Guide has established direct access to user traffic on lifestyle social network Xiaohongshu, and is speeding up the cooperation with short video apps Douyin (TikTok’s China version) and Kuaishou.
Honey Guide will continue to introduce and transfer traffic from public platforms to SCRM systems through various channels.
The Honey Guide SCRM system developed by the company will be launched to explore user values, enabling enterprises to independently manage the traffic and achieve sustainable development, thus facilitating the digitization for the hotel and travel industry.
