With the cultural tourism booming and platforms in chaos, who can do well in this business?

This article combines the actual situation of content platforms helping tourist cities to become popular, explains the advantages of cooperation between tourism platforms and content platforms in the new industry structure, and also takes the three major content giants, Kuaishou, Douyin and Xiaohongshu, as examples for specific analysis. It is recommended for new media content operators or cultural tourism workers to read.

From Zibo BBQ to Guizhou Village Supermarket, Tianjin Daye, and then to Harbin in early 2024.

Every tourist city that becomes popular overnight is inseparable from the promotion of content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu.

The new traffic center of the tourism industry is shifting, and the original industry structure is changing.

From users to merchants to tourist attractions, the key roles in the entire industry chain are being reshaped by content forms such as short videos, live broadcasts, and notes.

Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu are constantly increasing their efforts to build a consumer closed loop from planting grass to decision-making, further seizing the market, and the "war" between platforms is filled with smoke.

As the tourism industry continues to heat up in 2024, what stage has the layout between content platforms reached?

What are the differences and advantages between the platforms?

What is the key to doing well in the cultural tourism business?

1. What sparks can Kuaishou + Ctrip create?

Recently, Kuaishou Local Life reached a strategic cooperation with Ctrip.

Ctrip will gradually connect the supply chain of preferred products such as attraction tickets and vacation routes to the Kuaishou platform; and Kuaishou will also provide a variety of benefits such as traffic boost, product subsidies, and expert cooperation.

This cooperation is a win-win for both parties, and it also reflects the urgency and sense of crisis in the hot cultural and tourism market.

In the OTA market, Ctrip and Qunar.com have a market share of over 50%. If Tongcheng Travel is included, the market share is close to 70%. As the "big brother" of the cultural and tourism industry, Ctrip has dominated the online travel industry for many years.

However, as its content layout has not made much progress, Ctrip has gradually lost room for user growth, so it has been increasing its profitability by continuously raising the commission rate for merchants.

According to Ctrip's financial report, in the first three quarters of 2023, Ctrip's gross profit margin was 2.5-5 percentage points higher than the overall level of the previous five years, reaching 82.03%, and its net profit increased more than ten times, but this also caused complaints from suppliers.

Therefore, this move is not a long-term solution for Ctrip. Cooperation with Kuaishou can make up for the content shortcomings to a certain extent.

Jiang Linhao, general manager of Kuaishou's local lifestyle, hotel and travel business, said that although Kuaishou has accumulated a lot of travel content in the past, it has not been fully transformed into actual transactions. Unlike the previous cooperation with Tongcheng, Kuaishou's cooperation with Ctrip this time is more in-depth. They want to open up the transaction chain and form a relatively complete business closed loop.

In fact, Kuaishou has been exploring cultural and tourism business in recent years.

In 2020, Kuaishou launched the "Kuaishou Cultural and Tourism Photosynthesis Plan" to support cultural and tourism creators; since 2021, Kuaishou has successively cooperated with many scenic spots and businesses to hold a series of "scenic spot planting" activities.

In 2023, Kuaishou began to focus on the cultural tourism business. In February, Kuaishou separated the hotel and tourism business into a separate project; in May, Kuaishou launched the "Every City Has a Hand" 100-city joint cultural tourism project, supporting regional cultural tourism content with tens of billions of traffic, and achieved certain results.

This year, Kuaishou has made many new adjustments in its hotel and tourism business.

In terms of hotel and tourism products, according to Jiang Linhao's sharing, although Kuaishou has been expanding the hotel and tourism product categories last year, it was promoted together with catering and comprehensive products under the local life system, and carried out targeted research and development and promotion on them. However, this year, starting from the product display template, separate research and development will be carried out.

In terms of operations, Kuaishou will improve the distribution accuracy of tourism products through algorithms and further explore users' consumption needs. At the same time, it will also create operational tools suitable for the operating habits of hotel and travel merchants based on demand, thereby facilitating merchants' entry and operation and maintenance.

In terms of content format, there is no particularly obvious difference between Kuaishou and other short video platforms, but there is still a certain gap between it and Douyin in terms of the potential of cultural and tourism content.

For example, Harbin, which became very popular not long ago, had a playback volume of 12.84 billion for the main topic #Harbin on Kuaishou, while the playback volume on Douyin was 26.76 billion, more than twice that of Kuaishou; for the topic #Harbin Ice and Snow World, the playback volumes on Kuaishou and Douyin were 1.53 billion and 9.44 billion respectively. In addition, the richness of topics on Kuaishou is not as good as that on Douyin.

Image source: Kuaishou, Douyin screenshots

However, the misalignment of Kuaishou's user groups with other platforms and its accumulation of users in the mass market are significant advantages .

Data from QuestMobile shows that in May 2023, the overlap between Kuaishou's main site (high-frequency users) and Douyin was only 19.67%, a decrease of 6.3 percentage points from the same period last year; in September 2023, the proportion of Kuaishou users in third-tier and below cities reached 60.9%, and the user group aged 30 and below reached 40.3%.

This is the opportunity for the cooperation between Kuaishou and Ctrip.

A tourism report released by Qunar.com after the National Day last year showed that during the National Day holiday, the number of tourists from third- and fourth-tier cities increased by nearly 70% compared to before the epidemic. This shows that the tourism consumption potential of the mass market is being released. How to better tap user needs is the key to the cooperation between the two parties.

2. TikTok is coming on strong, how much of the pie can it get?

In a year when the tourism market was booming, cultural and tourism content on Douyin saw explosive growth.

According to the 2023 Douyin Lifestyle Service Hotel and Travel Report, the total number of travel-related videos played on the Douyin platform in the first three quarters reached 926.4 billion times, and received 25.2 billion likes. Compared with the first quarter, the number of travel-related videos in the third quarter increased by 60%, and the number of likes increased by 42%, and the user demand for watching travel content continued to grow.

Judging from the platform’s actions, Douyin continued to increase its investment in the hotel and tourism business last year.

In March, Douyin Life Service launched support incentives for newly opened hotels, and provided official support and operating guidance to hotels with market potential. At the end of May, Douyin launched the calendar room function, which supports users to make instant reservations and meets the needs of users to book hotels when they have a clear travel purpose. This is regarded as a historic moment for Douyin to enter the tourism industry OTA platform. Before this, Douyin mostly simply involved in the hotel business in the form of group purchases.

In June, Douyin launched the hotel and travel promotion IP "Haohao Travel Festival", working with different merchants to develop different travel plans for consumers. The participating merchants covered scenic spots, hotels, homestays, travel agencies, large transportation and other categories, and the exposure is expected to reach tens of billions. Then Douyin Life Service also adjusted its organizational structure, upgrading the hotel and travel business to the first-level department of Douyin Life Service, parallel to the store business, and improving the strategic position of the hotel and travel business.

Through a series of initiatives, Douyin's hotel and tourism business has emerged in the market.

Official data shows that as of September 2023, a total of 14,000 scenic spots and more than 100,000 hotels have opened official accounts on Douyin. Compared with the level at the beginning of the year, the number of hotel POI stores has increased by 61%, the number of online group purchase coupons for hotel merchants has increased by 92%, and the number of orders brought by hotel live broadcasts has increased by 9581%, and the overall scale has increased month by month.

It is worth mentioning that in the list of entertainment, travel and accommodation promoted by Douyin group buying, most of the listed players are third-party players such as travel agencies and MCN agencies. This means that Douyin is attracting many roles in the cultural and tourism industry and has become an important channel for businesses to operate.

According to the forecast of Bocom International, Douyin's market share in the hotel and travel industry will increase from 2% to 3% in 2023. During the same period, Ctrip's market share will increase by 5 percentage points, Meituan's market share will decrease by 3 percentage points, and Fliggy's market share will decrease by 1 percentage point.

This shows that Tik Tok is performing strongly and is constantly squeezing the development space of other small and medium-sized players.

Image source: Travel Weekly

However, for businesses, whether Douyin is worth investing in depends on their actual situation.

A research by Guotai Junan Securities shows that by comparing the order concentration of Douyin and Meituan in the hotel and travel merchants, it can be found that Douyin's top merchants contributed more orders, and about 40% of the platform's hotel and travel orders once belonged to only the top 5% of merchants.

Moreover, as a content platform, Douyin tests operational capabilities even more. If businesses want to obtain more traffic, they need to rely on their own live broadcasts or short video content to attract users.

Top merchants have sufficient budget to continue investing, but for small and medium-sized merchants, the approach of using content to drive sales does not seem to be friendly.

3. Niche attractions may be Xiaohongshu’s breakthrough weapon

Third-party data shows that in 2023, the number of travel experts on Xiaohongshu increased by 672% year-on-year, and the number of professional travel accounts increased by 1221% year-on-year.

Different from the advantages of short video platforms in creating cultural and tourism hotspots and popular content, the keywords of Xiaohongshu's content traffic are tone, aesthetics, community, etc.

For example, when Harbin became popular, the hot topics on other short video platforms were social content such as "Southern Little Potatoes" and "Guangxi Sugar Oranges", while on Xiaohongshu, atmospheric content such as the Diamond Sea, the Songhua River Sunset, and the Harbin version of "Harry Potter" vlog were more popular.

In response to Harbin's popularity, Xiaohongshu has also launched a travel guide section, which is divided into three sections: must-do for the first time, recommended by locals, and appointment to go to the bathhouse. Each section has different attractions, and each attraction page aggregates a large amount of content and map navigation. There are also reservation channels for popular attractions such as the Ice and Snow World.

However, popular tourist attractions are not the focus of Xiaohongshu's layout.

In recent years, the main themes of Xiaohongshu in culture and tourism have been homestays, camping, surrounding tours, citywalk and other content.

Xiaohongshu's "2023 Life Trend Observation Report" shows that in 2023, topics related to "citywalk" were viewed more than 2.1 billion times on Xiaohongshu, searches increased 140 times year-on-year, and more than 3.7 million notes shared stories related to "citywalk".

Xiaohongshu is naturally suitable for businesses that focus on boutique niche travel.

Take Feekr Travel as an example. As a travel agency that started out as a WeChat official account, the content it produces is mainly pictures and texts. The content capabilities of the official account can be easily transferred to Xiaohongshu. In addition, Xiaohongshu has many young female users and a high-quality community atmosphere, which is also a precise match with their own product tone.

Image source: Xiaohongshu screenshot

At present, Feekr Travel has accumulated 420,000 followers on Xiaohongshu, focusing on global niche destinations and has already explored certain operational experience.

Feekr Travel said in an interview with Travel Weekly, "From the perspective of conversion rate, travel packages for popular destinations perform generally well on Xiaohongshu. However, if it is a niche destination or a niche way of playing, combined with sudden hot spots (such as direct flights and visa-free information) to publish content, it will bring higher conversions. Feekr Travel once promoted a product for Phu Quoc Island on Xiaohongshu, and the conversion data was quite impressive."

For Xiaohongshu, niche is its characteristic, but it also means small size.

In addition, many tourism businesses said that there are still problems with the transaction service tools and mechanisms provided by Xiaohongshu, which limits the formation of a closed loop of "planting grass-pulling grass", and this is also the key point that Xiaohongshu needs to overcome.

Conclusion

As the tourism market continues to be hot, the platform landscape is also changing.

Overall, OTA's absolute voice has been shaken, but it is still the mainstream channel for online travel transactions and the basic foundation for business operations; Douyin is coming on strong and has already achieved a certain industry scale; Kuaishou has advantages in the mass market, but its potential has not yet been fully tapped; Xiaohongshu's exploration of niche attractions is both an advantage and a limitation.

It is worth mentioning that with the participation of content platforms, merchants' businesses have also undergone subtle changes. Many merchants have found that if they have good content on a certain platform, their business on other platforms will also improve simultaneously. From this perspective, the future operation of merchants is not only about channel selection, but also about how to embrace new ways of playing online content.

Author: Aries; Source: WeChat public account: TopKlout (ID: TopKlout)