On January 17, Kuaishou announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with Ctrip.
Kuaishou said: "For the first time, Ctrip will enter Kuaishou's local life ecology and provide Kuaishou veterans with high-quality and diversified travel products and services, and Kuaishou will also provide a package of rights and ...... such as traffic boosts, commodity subsidies, and influencer cooperation."Next,Ctrip will successively connect the ** chain of preferred products such as attraction tickets and vacation routes to the Kuaishou platform, and further optimize the consumption closed loop of "planting grass + pulling weeds" through Kuaishou's POI entrance。At present, Kuaishou users can already use the Kuaishou platformBook directScenic spot tickets and other travel products.
It is worth noting that in the past, OTA platforms such as Ctrip, Meituan, and Fliggy often used the B2C model, with the upstream being the wine travel ticketing party and the downstream being the C-end users. The cooperation between Kuaishou and Ctrip puts Ctrip in the position of B2B.
Judging from Kuaishou's official announcement copy, the mode of mutual drainage and cooperation between the two platforms is not based on the common mini programs in the past, but Ctrip directly provides Kuaishou with the best chain in terms of wine and tourism, and completes the transaction conversion in Kuaishou's own module. In this way, Ctrip has become Kuaishou's hospitality business service provider, serving the Kuaishou platform rather than C-end users, and Kuaishou will directly face C-end users.
In fact, from the current industry point of view, the capabilities of the two sides are very complementary. But if Meituan and Douyin are used to replace the two, and some people tell everyone that Douyin will make Meituan a service provider, the idea sounds much crazier.
Since Kuaishou and Ctrip can move forward "hand in hand", why is Douyin Meituan, which is also a short-** platform and an OTA platform, hot.
The reason for this is that Meituan's main business segment is the highly frequent food delivery business, which is Meituan's own high-frequency traffic entrance; Platforms such as Ctrip, Tongcheng, Fliggy, Qunar, etc., wine tourism is their main business segment, with low frequency of wine travel and high customer unit price, which makes it difficult for them to gain more user attention.
Therefore, the OTA platform without high-frequency traffic entrance, after a variety of exploration of its own traffic growth, and now the environment in which GMV is the first priority of the wine and tourism industry, their role and position with the traffic platform have changed again, and they are willing to sacrifice part of their brand mentality, so as to hide behind the traffic platform to become a B2B service provider, which is also the general trend.
And Ctrip is not the first, nor will it be the last, OTA platform to do so.
The relationship between OTA platform and traffic platform has undergone a transformation from a financier to a partner to a service provider.
When the user has no travel plan, the OTA platform wants to promote its own platform business to the user, so it is inevitable to place advertisements in some places that occupy the user's attention.
At this time, the advertising settlement method of the traffic platform and the OTA platform is often that the user generates browsing, clicking, jumping or even completing the transaction, and the conversion rate of each node where the user is converted by the grass may become the settlement method between the two platforms. Of course, this is also the early form of Internet advertising.
Such a cooperation model is naturally the most ideal for the OTA platform, and while pinching the core transaction link in their own hands, the minds of users on their own platform have also been disseminated, which is conducive to promoting users to skip the content platform and directly consume on the OTA platform. So for a long time and even now, jumping between apps is still one of the main ways to attract traffic. Not only OTA platforms, but all platforms that need to facilitate user payments are happy to use this method to complete the initial user accumulation.
After the accumulation of the user's mind on an OTA platform reaches a certain stage, the implantation of Mini Programs in the traffic platform has also become an auxiliary solution.
Mini programs on WeChat include Meituan, Ele.me, Ctrip, Tongcheng, Fliggy, etc., Alipay also has mini programs on these platforms, and Douyin also has Ele.me, Ctrip, Tongcheng and other mini programs, but there is no Meituan.
Regardless of whether there is a business conflict between the ontology platform of these Mini Programs and WeChat, Alipay, Douyin, etc., the implantation of Mini Programs is actually insignificant for traffic platforms. After all, the Mini Program itself does not have the ability to grow traffic and acquire customers, and this method largely caters to a small number of people who have precise needs, such as colleagues using Meituan Mini Programs to order milk tea together in WeChat groups, and a user suddenly wants to compare Meituan, Ctrip, Tongcheng, Fliggy's hotel** in Alipay, etc. Under such a link, the traffic platform can continue to keep the user's mind on its own platform, and the OTA platform can get a deal, which is a win-win situation for both parties.
Different from the above-mentioned way of users jumping between apps, in this way, the OTA platform often needs to pay a certain technical interface fee to the traffic platform, and the traffic platform may also draw additional transaction commissions.
The above-mentioned cooperation model between OTA platform and traffic platform has existed for a long time and will continue to exist in the future. It's just that when the traffic platform is not satisfied that it is always making a wedding dress for other people's transactions, they have begun to engage in local life and tourism business.
At this time, the business of the traffic platform itself begins to have a direct conflict with these OTA platforms, and the first thing that the traffic platform needs to cut off is the link between apps. Maybe Mini Programs will continue to exist, but as mentioned above, Mini Programs do not have their own traffic growth capabilities, so they are insignificant to traffic platforms.
Cutting off the jump link between apps, the OTA platform can naturally also carry out content marketing and grass planting on the traffic platform, especially when the user's mind has been accumulated, the user will automatically go to the corresponding platform to complete the transaction after the traffic platform is planted. However, OTA platforms will also face a problem with this kind of content marketing, that is, these traffic platforms may limit the flow of their opponents' keywords.
Especially in the upcoming 2024 tourism season, content marketing is limited and App jumps are all issues that OTA platforms need to consider, and even a tough battle for users. After 2023, the confrontation between Douyin and Meituan has sounded the alarm for all OTA platforms.
As a result, in order not to miss the transaction growth that should be there, these OTA platforms also had to succumb to the traffic platform and become their service providers. And Ctrip isn't the first OTA platform to do so.
The strategic cooperation model between the two and the reference case of commercial feasibility are not actually on these head OTA platforms, but on some mid-waist OTA platforms, they may be Qianqianhui, Lianlian peripheral travel, to set off peripheral travel, and so on, which is an OTA system that serves both C-end users and B-end platforms.
For example, Qianqianhui, founded in 2014, advertises itself as "a company that focuses on high-quality eating, drinking, and entertainment in the local and surrounding areas."Local Life Services Company
Qianqianhui does not have its own APP, but it also has its own user mind. Chichie usuallyIt is attached to the traffic platform in the form of a mini program, WeChat, Douyin can search for Qianqianhui's own applets, and users can place orders and complete transactions directly through these applets, which is how it faces C-end users.
According to Qianqianhui's own official website, its business has covered platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, WeChat, QQ Small World, AutoNavi, Alipay, and Pinduoduo. It aims to build a bridge between a large number of merchants and multiple platformsFor merchants, they don't need to connect with multiple traffic platforms, and for the platform, they can quickly get more merchants, which is the living space of Qianqianhui service providers.
Qianqianhui is a typical small program service provider model in the OTA industryFrom the perspective of the profit model of this link, the upstream links various merchants, wine and tourism merchants, and charges them a certain commission, and the downstream links these traffic platforms and pays a certain fee to the platformThis fee may include a cloud service fee, as well as a payment fee for each transaction.
Compared with Qianqianhui, the model of Lianlian Peripheral Travel is closer to Ctrip, and Lianlian Peripheral Travel has its own app. However, whether it is Qianqianhui or Lianlian Peripheral Travel, they all started with WeChat Mini Programs, and most of the long-term models are also based on WeChat Mini Programs to reach transactions, until Douyin began to engage in local life, and other traffic platforms such as Douyin have also become the objects they can serve.
In the case that content platforms like Douyin seriously lacked local life reserves at the beginning, Lianlian and Qianqian can quickly inject relevant ** chains into them. The cooperation with Lianlian Qianqian was one of the main ways for Douyin to engage in local life at the beginning. In March 2023, Lianlian Peripheral Travel announced that it continued to maintain its leading position in the field of food delivery on Douyin, ranking first, completing about 2500 million payment transactions.
"Through the deepening of cooperation with the Douyin platform, Lianlian has further broadened its ecosystem and provided users with a variety of payment channel options......So as to enjoy a more convenient and smooth service experience. As an industry leader in the local lifestyle segment, Lianlian Nearby Travel will continue to expand its service level and continuously optimize its technical ......”
On the official website of Kuaishou's local life service, we also found that Kuaishou listed Qianqianhui, Lianlian Peripheral Travel, To Departure, and Peripheral Travel as its own service providers.
At this point, we can also understand the cooperation between Ctrip and Kuaishou:On the basis of being slightly inferior to Douyin in terms of the speed of local life layout, Kuaishou needs "super-large versions of Lianlian and Qianqian" to make up for it, that is, Ctrip.
Douyin, which has been working on the layout of local life for a year or two, wants to firmly grasp the high-value business of wine and tourism in its own hands, so this is why Douyin is not suitable for Ctrip, and Kuaishou is suitable for Ctrip.
Ctrip, which is difficult to grab users' attention, has not officially announced the number of active users in its financial report for many years, and at the same time, strong traffic platforms such as Kuaishou and Douyin do local life, and the reason is that its own traffic growth has peaked, so it has shifted its attention to the conversion transactions within the platform. All in all, traffic growth is hard to find for OTA platforms, and it is not for the traffic platforms themselves.
Nowadays, this kind of giant platform is born with the competition of the track, that is, one party serves the other, in the final analysis, it is just an inevitable product of the era of stock competition.
There are many cases of giants being service providers at the same time, such as Ali is a typical e-commerce service provider, and its various service formats that support merchants have long been developed very comprehensively, but the key is that its main purpose as a service provider is to link merchants and their own platforms.
It is indeed uncommon for giants to end up as service providers, linking merchants with other platforms, especially when the roles of both parties are close to each other.
In such cooperation, perhaps both the traffic platform and the OTA platform will be sacrificed, and the traffic platform is like a device manufacturer that does not make chips, although it can obtain a large amount of core support in a short period of time, it is also easy to face the situation of being stuck; The OTA platform is hidden behind the traffic platform, losing more of its own traffic and the possibility of communication of the platform's mind. As a result, the expansion of users flows to the content platform, and the channel flows to the service provider.
In these seemingly win-win cooperation, many games that we cannot see are still hidden in deeper water.
The title picture and the accompanying pictures in the text** are on the Internet.