Since last year, almost the entire Internet circle has participated in the community group buying battle, frantically burning money, robbing traffic, and snapping up markets. As that battle enters a stalemate, all the players are now setting their sights on another new track - online travel.
Not only the current top field players such as Fliggy, Meituan, Ctrip, Tencent, who have been focused on travel services, magnates such as Douyin (TikTok's domestic version), Didi, Pinduoduo, and Xiaohongshu are also itching to try. Online travel is turning into another popular Internet bet.
As leading platforms of the tourism industry, Tongcheng-Elong and Ctrip were the first to focus on the fat traffic of Douyin. The two parties chose to cooperate in the early stage. Douyin has been serving platforms such as Tongcheng-Elong and Ctrip by providing referrals via dedicated external chains on its merchants' homepage. Of course, being such a service provider is obviously not the best option for the ambitious ByteDance and Douyin, as this will not be the way where Douyin can best capitalize on the enormous traffic it has been seeing.
Now change is happening. According to Tech Planet, Douyin has recently tested a business platform called "Mangosteen Travel", where travel products are shown in a mini-program embedded in Douyin. The platform includes ticket booking, hotel reservations, and other functions. From giving ideas via videos to transactions, everything is completed in the closed loop of the Douyin App. Didi also tested a website called "Xiaoju Travel Agency" recently, which includes domestic travel, foreign travel and other businesses but does not support purchases yet.
Douyin has 600 million daily active users and Didi 400 million monthly ones. The two giants are poised to stir up the OTA market.
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