From payments to ecological transaction services, the value of digitalization is diversifying.
Every payment made by users in OTAs, airlines, hotels, scenic spots, taxis, and other scenarios constitutes the most prosperous recovery of the tourism industry in 2023.
According to the data of ePay, in terms of payment orders and amounts, the number of online and offline payment orders in the domestic air travel industry (air tickets, hotels, tourism, and travel) increased by 247% year-on-year and 127% compared with the pre-epidemic period in 2019The average value of orders increased by 262% year-on-year and by 141% compared to the same period in 2019.
However, this round of market recovery has also brought more new challenges. On the one hand, the needs of travelers have changed, from large group tours and sightseeing tours to in-depth tours and customized tours, forcing businesses to cultivate more sensitive user insightsOn the other hand, the supply side has ushered in a new round of digital transformation, requiring operations to be in line with refinement and services to be closer to quality.
As an important closed loop of every consumption and experience in the air and tourism industry, the smoothness of payment is not only related to user experience, but also related to the construction of digital capabilities and user recognition of enterprises, which in turn affects the market share and influence of enterprises. So, as an expert in digital transaction services, ePay is good at empowering the industry to promote transformation, and what unique value does ePay play in the new cycle of air travel recovery in 2023?What role can it play in the next recovery process?The action of ePay may be worth pondering and referencing.
The market is recovering
EPRO repaired the road ahead of schedule
Digitalization has been repeatedly mentioned in the past three years of the epidemic, and it is also an important embodiment of the internal skills of all tourism enterprises.
Enterprise digitalization is a process of accumulation. Air travel is characterized by heavy assets, heavy manpower, multiple scenarios, and multiple operation models, and it is likely that it will not be able to reduce costs and increase efficiency by reengineering products such as changing planes and repairing hotels, but through digital thinking and tools to connect scenarios or reengineering processes, so that each operation data can be analyzed, applied, and precipitated, and finally achieve revenue growth for the enterprise.
Especially in the hotel industry, the industry concentration is low, the ecological transaction chain is complex, involving hotel groups, franchisees, channel providers and various upstream and downstream enterprises, most of the hotel operations are still relying on human execution, and the system capacity is weak, so that the process of digital transformation faces the challenge of data loss and fragmentation. Taking transaction as an example, as a key part of enterprise operation, many hotel headquarters and franchisees, channel providers, and first-chain service providers are still using manual reconciliation and settlement.
In response to the pain points of B-end payment in the hotel industry, EPRO has tailored an omni-channel integrated payment transaction service solution for the hotel industry in 2022, which radiates the whole link of upstream and downstream by weaving the industry payment service network, from hotel groups, B&Bs, to hotel system providers, OTAs, TMCs, etc., all of which can improve the transaction service system in this transaction service network, and "build the road" for the growth of the industry before the market recovers.
For example, in the process of cooperating with a hotel group, ePay can achieve automatic reconciliation and settlement by connecting with the hotel group's CRS, PMS and settlement systems, helping the hotel group improve its operational efficiency by more than 30%, and the complex financial accounting, reconciliation and settlement business with various channels and franchisees can be realized through the system automation.
After the hotel industry began a vengeful recovery in 2023, the results of this solution were immediate. According to Han Qi, partner and vice president of ePay, ePay has cooperated with leading hotel groups including Marriott, Intercontinental, Shangmei Digital Intelligence, Yibo Hotel Group, as well as well-known system platform companies in the industry, such as Green Cloud Software, Direct Guest Pass, and Order. "At present, the transaction scale under this payment solution has also reached the level of 100 billion yuan. ”
In particular, a good digital solution is flexible and can evolve with the needs of the enterprise. In the process of implementing the above solutions, ePay found that hotels are still facing more complex scenario problems in the payment process:
First, whether it is an official direct sales platform or a distribution channel, hotel groups will face the problem of "two clearances" in industry supervision
Second, membership and direct sales platforms have become the key development strategy of the hotel group, but there are pain points in the process of distribution and drainage through influencers, guests and employees
Third, hotel resources are relatively scattered, and it is necessary to create a more centralized settlement plan for business travel scenarios
Fourth, with the resumption of inbound and outbound tourism, hotel groups have developed internationalization trends and actions, but they have relatively little experience in cross-border settlement of funds.
In response to the above problems, according to Han Qi, at present, EPRO has added a number of capabilities to the original solution to solve related problems, including providing professional hotel industry consultants to customize payment solutions for hotel groups to achieve fund collection and supervision of hotel groups, and providing B2B account settlement solutions for hotel groups and business travel management companies (TMCs) to improve the efficiency of order settlement and reduce capital costsProvide customized gig distribution tax planning solutions and cross-border capital capabilities for hotel groups to help open up domestic and foreign transaction scenarios.
There are many customized solutions for vertical industries like this. Han Qi said that ePay hopes to help traditional industries, including the hotel industry, accelerate their digital transformation in transaction scenarios.
From payments to eco-transaction services
The value of digitalization is diversifying
At the 20th Anniversary Celebration and Digital Strategy Conference held in August this year, ePay released its digital strategy of "Dual Transformation and Dual Growth", which includes horizontal broadening, that is, a comprehensive upgrade from payment to transaction servicesVertical deepening means taking a differentiated path to B, that is, through continuous and efficient collaboration and intelligent evolution, to better serve customers and create value in the digital era.
Yu Chen, co-founder and president of ePay, mentioned in his analysis of the digital strategy that in addition to continuing to deepen the digital transformation of traditional industries, ePay should also improve the Internet 30 ecosystems.
Why an air travel payment company should make efforts and improve the Internet 30 ecosystems.
Most of the domestic transaction services are single payment solutions, and there are few ecological services around the scene, and as early as 2021, ePay, as an "expert in digital transaction services", laid out the Internet 30 Combine payment with various consumption scenarios. At that time, affected by force majeure, many once effective customer acquisition methods were forced to be invalid, and the Internet 3The concept of 0 has greatly penetrated into the aviation and tourism industry, coupled with the fact that Generation Z has become the main force of consumption, forcing aviation and tourism companies to reconstruct the path of customer acquisition, retention and repurchase.
Take Airline Internet 3For example, at the end of October, when Xiamen Airlines officially opened the Beijing Daxing-Doha and Xiamen-Doha regular routes, Xiamen Airlines and Yibao Pay jointly issued the "Hello Doha" digital collection with Xiamen Airlines' new life experience officer "Lu Manman" as the main image and Doha scenery as the background.
It is reported that the biggest feature of the "Hello Doha" digital collection is that it combines new interactive marketing methods, which can more conveniently realize the combination of experience and rights, provide more diversified interactive methods, enhance user stickiness, promote customer retention, and build a more accurate and efficient marketing path while conveying the young and energetic image of Xiamen Airlines brand to users. It could even be said that this is one of the types of "loyalty programs" created for young people.
In addition to Xiamen Airlines, since the beginning of this year, many airlines such as Shenzhen Airlines, ** Airlines, Tianjin Airlines, Fuzhou Airlines, Jiangxi Airlines, West Airlines, and Jiuyuan Airlines have joined hands with Yibao Pay to open the application of the Internet 30 new marketing model. At the same time, ePay also announced the panorama of digital aviation transaction services this year, with the core goal of helping customers achieve digital upgrading, through the digitization of tools and structures, focusing on B2C direct sales, B2B distribution, platform marketing innovation, auxiliary support, payment middle platform, etc., to help customers achieve omni-channel, multi-scenario convenient and safe payment and personalized services, and implement digital capabilities.
Han Qi said that with the penetration of emerging technologies into traditional industries, airlines are not only using digital technology to reshape business processes and management models, but also hope to use the Internet30 These emerging technologies empower brand marketing and business growth.
And the reason why ePay can do a good job in the Internet 30, it lies in the confidence of the aviation tourism industry for nearly 20 years. Han Qi believes: "Business society is inseparable from transactions, and ultimately needs to pay a closed loop. After the closed loop of payment, a large amount of data will be precipitated, which in turn can help us re-examine how to better allocate the product and service resources of our partners, how to provide personalized marketing, and further make transactions more efficient, convenient, safe and transparent. ”
Long slopes and heavy snow
Preparing for a new round of recovery
It is rumored that Warren Buffett has a view of life: life is like a snowball, and the important thing is to find very wet snow and long slopes.
This is the theory of "long slope and thick snow", which was frequently cited by business managers, and the so-called long slope refers to finding a track with potential and space, while thick snow refers to building sufficient competitiveness and having a long-term spirit. This theory is also suitable for the B-end payment of air travel.
The B-end payment of air travel is a typical "long slope".
From the perspective of payment, payment itself is an extremely complex business, involving multiple links such as payers, account-side payment institutions, clearing institutions, acquirer-side payment institutions, acquiring outsourcing service providers, and payees. Under normal circumstances, the payer is the C-side, and the account-side payment institutions such as Alipay and WeChat Pay are connectedAs the B-side, the payee is connected by the acquirer-side payment institution or the acquiring outsourcing service provider, including ePay.
Compared with C-end payment, the loyalty of merchants is much higher than that of users, and it is not easy to transfer subsidies as a transfer. Focusing on the air travel scenario, due to the large number of industry participants, complex subdivision scenarios, and long transaction chains, different roles need solutions that are more suitable for the business, so it is difficult for mobile payment giants like Ant Group to customize personalized solutions for the B-end of air travel, which gives ePay enough room for growth.
Looking at the development of the air travel industry, after a retaliatory recovery in 2023, the momentum of recovery in 2024 will continue. The latest McKinsey report points out that the era of double-digit growth in China's consumer market is over, but the service industry, especially tourism, is a notable exception, with domestic tourism now rebounding and exceeding 2019 levels, and tourists to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan are close to pre-pandemic levels, and the shift from goods consumption to service consumption is expected to continue until 2024.
The biggest attraction for the growth of tourism in 2024 is not only the continued expansion of the internal circulation of tourism consumption, but also the recovery and growth of international tourism. In the first half of 2023, the prosperity index of the outbound tourism market exceeded that of the same period in 2019, and the number of inbound and outbound passengers increased by about 170% year-on-year. According to ePay's data, the transaction volume related to the cross-border foreign exchange and cross-border RMB services provided by ePay for air travel enterprises increased by 260% year-on-year in the first half of the year.
Currently, international travel is recovering to around half of 2019 levels due to visa restrictions and high airfares**. However, now that the resumption of international flights is progressing in an orderly manner, the relaxation of visas has made a substantial breakthrough. On November 24, ** announced that it would try out a unilateral visa-free policy for ordinary passport holders from six countries: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and MalaysiaSubsequently, Malaysia announced that it would implement visa-free access for Chinese citizens for 30 days from December 1, and as of October 27 this year, China has concluded mutual visa exemption agreements with 153 countries, allowing them to travel to these countries with applicable passports without applying for visas in advance.
As the first institution to obtain the pilot license for cross-border foreign exchange payment business and complete the first cross-border foreign exchange payment business of payment institutions in China, ePay has been paying attention to the changes in the cross-border air travel market.
Han Qi mentioned that after three years of the epidemic, the cross-border tourism market has undergone many changes, and there are many new players in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. As an important part of the closed-loop capital of the air and tourism industry, payment has also encountered new challenges, such as higher requirements for the convenience and timeliness of payment, and in addition, the diversity of currencies and better exchange rates have also attracted more and more attention.
Therefore, how to simplify the transaction process as much as possible under the premise of ensuring compliance, how to meet the payment Xi habits of different regions and languages, etc., have become the key to the rolling snowball of ePay to generate compound interest in the new recovery cycle.
In response to these problems, ePay provides a variety of innovative solutions, including cross-border payment solutions, leading global air travel account transaction service solutions, intelligent risk control and anti-fraud solutions, etc., to provide more convenient, safe, efficient and low-cost transaction services for travel enterprises.
On the whole, the B-end transaction service of the aviation and tourism industry is destined to provide the most favorable supply for the continuous "marathon" of the industry's recovery. Only the last player in the industry will be the winner, and will roll a thick snowball on this long slope.