In 2023, the tourism market will return to the growth curve, but the growth method has quietly changed.
On November 21, Tongcheng Travel announced its third quarter financial report for 2023. Data showed that its cumulative paying users in the past 12 months reached 225 million, a month-on-month increase of 3.1%, setting a record high. After the Internet demographic dividend peaked, Tongcheng Travel is one of the companies that still maintains high growth in user scale in China.
The diversified service scenarios built by Tongcheng Travel have brought continuous improvement in user scale, making it the travel platform with the largest user scale in China. Industry insiders believe that if the growth of the tourism industry in the past decade was due to the superposition of macroeconomic growth, demographic dividend, mobile Internet development and other favorable factors, then in the next decade, the tourism industry will inevitably change lanes at an accelerated pace and shift from growth to The competition has entered the stage of value competition.
Tongcheng Travel is a firm practitioner of “axiology”. In recent years, focusing on the market development of new national tourism, Tongcheng Travel has continued to develop new service scenarios based on user needs to meet the diverse needs of users and keep the company’s main line of development close to user value itself.
Responding to new demand with new supply
The development of user scale comes from satisfying needs. The fragmentation and diversification of travel demand will be a reality that the tourism industry will continue to face in the future.
The fragmented travel demand comes from the rapid increase in people’s travel consumption in the past three years and the increased freedom brought about by the development of tourism informatization. Various solutions and more flexible combinations are available for all aspects of tourism consumption, such as major transportation, minor transportation, accommodation, scenic spots, catering, entertainment, and shopping. People’s travel consumption also shows greater immediacy. The diversified demand stems from the deep integration of culture and tourism and the increasingly abundant market supply. Many travel methods such as music festivals, marathons, and CityWalk have become popular.
Tongcheng Travel realized a few years ago that simple and crude market supply cannot achieve sustained industry growth. On the one hand, as information barriers are gradually broken down, the way of making money by reselling information gaps has long been a “past tense”. On the other hand, if you want to survive and develop in an industry with rapidly changing needs, product and service innovation is essential.
At the 2023 Global Travel News Summit, Tongcheng Travel CMO Bai Zhiwei gave his own prediction on the future development of the tourism market: the tourism industry has ushered in an explosive recovery, and “new supply” is the key to promoting this recovery.
Focusing on new supplies, Tongcheng Travel has built the company’s three-dimensional engine, namely penetration of full service scenarios, full coverage of user needs, and deep empowerment of the industry chain. He hopes that through this three-dimensional matrix, he can provide consumers with good services.
In terms of service scenario penetration, in the third quarter of 2023, Tongcheng Travel reached a strategic cooperation with Huawei, and the booking services it provided were launched on Huawei’s “negative screen”. In October, Tongcheng Travel launched the development of Huawei’s Harmony app, becoming the first domestic online travel platform to launch the development of Harmony system applications. Offline, while strengthening offline services at bus stations, Tongcheng Travel has also established service points at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, air-rail transfer service points at Guangzhou Baiyun Airport, and Tongcheng Travel Membership Service Centers at Daxing Airport.
In terms of product demand, Tongcheng Travel’s “air ticket blind box” has become a phenomenal innovative product in the tourism industry. Since then, Tongcheng Travel has continued to launch new tourism product forms such as infrastructure fuel sub-cards and destination blind boxes based on market demand to increase the travel consumption needs of young tourists.
In 2023, Tongcheng Travel will continue to deploy cultural tourism experience scenarios in different circles such as e-sports events, music performances, museums, and Scripted Murder Game, and combine “rigid-demand” tourism travel products such as air tickets and hotels with rich cultural tourism resources , providing tourists with a one-stop new travel consumption experience.
