Xiaohongshu controls the traffic of travel OTA

As content communities with a large number of active users, Xiaohongshu and Douyin provide countless travel tips. This article analyzes the choices of users on different travel platforms under the influence of these notes and videos, as well as the hidden rules between platforms.

"I used Fliggy to order train tickets, Ctrip to order hotels, and Meituan to order tickets and restaurant group purchase coupons, but the platform I decided to use was Xiaohongshu," said Xiao Sun, who used at least four apps while planning his three-day trip to Nanjing.

"My wife looked up everything she wanted to eat, drink and play in Spain on Xiaohongshu, and she made a lot of mistakes, but there was nothing she could do, and there was no alternative platform," said Wei Ge from Beijing, who found that Xiaohongshu was becoming a guidebook for outbound travel for people around him. Maomao, who had just returned from studying in the UK, was preparing for a 10-day trip to Europe, and he opened Xiaohongshu to finalize the route for a trip around Italy.

Compared with Xiaohongshu, Douyin's content is more down-to-earth and brainwashes workers over and over again. "When I just finished watching the scenery of Harbin Ice and Snow World and the 'monkeys' that can be fed in Changchun, Jilin, Douyin has already started to recommend hotel order links to me." Xiao Jin from Nanjing also completed his five-day tour of Northeast China during the Spring Festival. In addition to Xiao Jin, at least three people around him have invited the editor to travel to Northeast China.

Unconsciously, Xiaohongshu and Douyin are becoming the travel brains of the most consumer-powerful groups, while Ctrip and Meituan are more like optional ordering tools, although they also run content communities.

At present, both outbound travel and domestic travel have returned to the prosperity of 2019. Faced with the aggressive development of Xiaohongshu and Douyin, OTAs have chosen to join if they cannot beat them.

01 The little red potatoes can’t suppress their anger towards OTA

Every time you travel, download several travel apps and compare prices from multiple stores, which is a sign of respect for your wallet.

Surprisingly, although there are many apps, Tongcheng (Ctrip holds 25.70% of the shares) and Qunar (already merged, Ctrip has 45% of the voting rights) can be said to be Ctrip's brothers. Together with Meituan, the four companies actually account for about 80% of the market share. As content seeding platforms, Douyin and Xiaohongshu also naturally conform to human nature and constantly stimulate people's needs for food, drink, housing and transportation.

Here, we might as well make a reasonable guess - since Xiaohongshu and Douyin have grasped the brains of young people when traveling , then whoever is closer to them will get a bigger piece of the cake, right?

For example, if you add "Compare prices from different platforms and book a hotel through Platform A, as it is the cheapest and their customer service is also good" in a very realistic guide, an unexpected wave of traffic will flow into Platform A.

With this guess, the editor went to Xiaohongshu and Douyin to look for some clues. Since hotels basically occupy the majority of tourism, here we search for the hotel business of Ctrip and Meituan .

(Photo source: Xiaohongshu)

It is obvious that Qunar has done a lot of "homework" on Xiaohongshu. Not only did it put up hotel and coupon links, it also posted a lot of spam posts to guide Xiaohongshu users to the Qunar APP. Although Ctrip did not promote on Xiaohongshu, under every post complaining about Ctrip, there was a message from Ctrip's official customer service, hoping for further communication.

However, Meituan and Tongcheng have a bad reputation on Xiaohongshu. Many Xiaohongshu users share their real experiences on the platform to prevent others from falling into traps. At the same time, neither of them has an official account like Ctrip to follow up on the post to discuss accommodation issues.

(Photo source: Xiaohongshu)

Tongcheng is closer to Douyin. As Xiaohongshu said in the picture below, Douyin has been promoting Tongcheng, which can save a lot of money when booking hotels. At the same time, Tongcheng has also firmly grasped the hot spot of Harbin this year. Unlike Tuniu and Ctrip, they only put routes and guides on Douyin, while Tongcheng personally went out to the airport to welcome visitors from all directions.

(Photo source: Xiaohongshu)

In general, Ctrip is slowly working on various content platforms, while Meituan has not put much effort into content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin. The reason is very simple. Meituan itself has "natives" who love catering, eating, drinking and having fun, and many people have developed the habit of one-stop ordering from Meituan.

According to observations, except for Qunar, the comments on Xiaohongshu about Ctrip, Tongcheng, and Meituan are relatively authentic, and there is no negative review for the sake of negative review. After reading many negative review posts, the editor found that the points of complaints about each company are different.

02 Middlemen steal consumers’ wallets

Ctrip, which has 80 million active users, has more positive reviews.

In addition to the better customer service and after-sales service mentioned above, Ctrip's ordinary members can enjoy room upgrades, free breakfast, late check-out, and free cancellation benefits.

(Image source: Ctrip, Tongcheng, Meituan)

There are relatively many posts expressing dissatisfaction with Meituan, Tongcheng and Qunar. There are roughly two situations: one is that people arrive at the hotel but "there is no such room"; the other is that the hotel always shows that the check-in has failed when people are about to check in, and a considerable amount of handling fees are charged for cancellation . There are even more posts about Tongcheng-related issues.

During the search, I came across some unexpected comments. A hotel receptionist confirmed the current situation of split orders: a customer placed an order on Meituan for 170 yuan, but Meituan transferred the order to Ctrip, and the price became 140 yuan.

(Photo source: Xiaohongshu)

This is puzzling. Why would Fliggy and Meituan give orders to the big brother Ctrip?

An example from May last year may give us a glimpse of part of the truth. A customer in Shanghai booked a hotel and an unexpected price difference occurred on the order. The customer booked the hotel on Fliggy for 488.29 yuan, but when he arrived at the hotel front desk, he was told that there was no record of the order on the Fliggy platform. However, the hotel front desk found that a customer with the same name but different other information had booked a room at the hotel on another platform for 422 yuan, which means that a price difference of 66.29 yuan was earned in the middle.

Who made the money? Another hotel receptionist gave the answer - online OTA agents. When you book a hotel on major platforms, especially hotels with agent logos, the order on platform A is 600 yuan. If the hotel's official price / platform B / platform C only costs 400 yuan, the agents will take your information and make a net profit of 200 yuan by booking the hotel offline / changing the platform booking.

However, if the agent does not make much money or cannot compete with other agents, order cancellation becomes a high probability event, which is the second situation - the middleman is "too lazy to run", and the consumer can only receive a sudden cancellation message.

Recently, the editor searched for prices of brand hotels such as Qunar and Atour in Shanghai, Nanjing, Harbin, Sanya and other places and found that Tongcheng got a lower price. This may explain why there are more dissatisfied posts about Tongcheng - consumers who choose Tongcheng with a lower price face a higher risk of not being able to get a room.

It should be added that we cited the case of Fliggy and Meituan orders being allocated to Ctrip above, that is, Ctrip has the lowest price in some cases, so why are there not so many negative reviews? In many complaints about the lack of rooms on the Ctrip platform, most of them complained about the hotels, and their attitude towards Ctrip was relatively neutral - Ctrip almost always actively solved the problem and gave some subsidies.

However, such an approach only treats the symptoms and not the root cause. Regulating the behavior of agents and promptly and properly resolving the problem of lack of housing have become necessary options for each platform to retain consumers for a long time.

03 It is better to earn money from domestic travel than from outbound travel

The above are all the feedback from the little red potatoes on their experience of major OTAs when traveling in China. In addition to Harbin and Sanya, visa exemptions in Southeast Asian regions such as Malaysia and Singapore have also accelerated the recovery of outbound tourism.

OTA platforms have also benefited - in Q4 2023, Ctrip's outbound hotel and air ticket bookings recovered to more than 80% of the same period in 2019, and total bookings on global OTA platforms increased by more than 70% year-on-year.

However, on the outbound travel guide platform, Xiaohongshu, Ctrip's outbound travel services are not as good as those in China due to the complex situation overseas.

(Photo source: Xiaohongshu)

There are many problems with overseas travel - when you arrive at your destination, you can't find someone to take you to or pick you up at the airport; the hotel you booked disappears when you travel, and there are repeated mistakes in the subsequent processing...

There is also the most common farce of four-way tug-of-war - the platform agreed on free cancellation within the specified time, but when the customer said he wanted to cancel, the platform said the hotel disagreed and would charge a fee; when the customer called the hotel again, the hotel said that he could cancel for free, but the platform was responsible for the refund; after the platform knew about the communication between the customer and the hotel, it "relaxed" and said that half of the money could be refunded, and the other half would be given to the agent; after 7 hours of trouble, the customer did not stay in the hotel and had to give the agent 600.

Even a strong company like Ctrip cannot handle unexpected situations overseas. In fact, Ctrip is already the best domestic OTA platform overseas, with diversified products and low prices.

(Source of the comparison of overseas hotel prices on various APPs: Minsheng Securities Research Institute)

From the perspective of profitability, overseas is certainly a blue ocean, worthy of all OTA platforms to "shed blood". However, if the docking of personnel in each link and the docking of hotels are not done well, consumers will have to flee the platform. After all, there are also APPs such as booking, Agoda, Airbnb, etc. overseas. When a friend booked a hotel in Sydney, he downloaded 6 APPs and finally chose Agoda, which was cheaper.

At present, outbound travel is not as popular as domestic travel. Various departments in China are spending a lot of money to "sell" their own attractions. There is still a lot of gold to be mined in this 9.6 million square kilometers of land.

A typical example is that the venues for the Spring Festival Gala in Shenyang, Liaoning, Changsha, Hunan, Xi'an, Shaanxi, and Kashgar, Xinjiang, all received unprecedented attention after the broadcast. Data shows that during this year's Spring Festival holiday, the number of tourism orders in Shenyang increased by 1,500% year-on-year.

In addition, cultural tourism in various places has also started to promote itself, and Harbin's cultural tourism is undoubtedly the "top seller" this year. On February 10, Ctrip data showed that Harbin's travel orders on the first day of the Spring Festival holiday increased by 244% year-on-year, and ticket orders increased by more than 30 times year-on-year.

Little Red Potato fans and Douyin users are also exploring Mount Fuji and Swiss towns in China. Domestic travel and searching for China's Little Northern Europe have become the choice of more people.

(Photo source: Xiaohongshu)

Behind this, the builders' cultural and tourism departments need to make reasonable investments to create and disseminate content, with Xiaohongshu, Douyin and other content-seeking platforms as auxiliary, using better algorithms to provide real and reliable publicity. OTA platforms are also needed in the fulfillment link to avoid empty rooms, cancellations without reason, price gouging and other behaviors.

The closeness of the relationship between Xiaohongshu and OTAs seems to depend on Xiaohongshu - balancing the ratio of real posts and water posts. The bigger proposition is to balance the weight of commercialization and content.

Author: Renee; Editor: Jingwei

WeChat public account: Sirui Insight (ID: siruidongcha)