By Alisha Somanas
Everyone’s jumping on the online travel industry bandwagon, and the mega marketplaces like Alibaba and Rakuten are no exception. But when you see what they’ve got on their hands, it’s no surprise they want to wield what they’ve got. They’ve found a way to differentiate in a unique way that looks like it will be hard to beat: user data. At the final day of the WIT conference, we caught up with these two Asia marketplace giants to find out their plans for the travel segment.
“We’ve transitioned from a transaction platform to a matching platform,” said Takanobu Yamamoto, Executive Officer of Travel Business at Rakuten. “We tell users we can find the best hotel for him or her, for his or her unique personality, and tell hotels that we can find hotels the best fit users.”
Taking advantage of the massive amount of user data they have at hand, everything from whether the customer owns a dog to whether he or she prefers to drink wine, based on their purchasing habits, Rakuten and Alitrip – Alibaba’s new travel platform which strives to customize everything for the consumer from what customers need before the trip to what they need during the trip and after the trip – are both spreading their wings at an unprecedented pace.
Alitrip, the travel division recently rolled out by Alibaba’s ecosystem, was rebranded from Taobao Travel in October 2014 but has already served 50 million travellers last year alone. During a 24-hour shopping festival on Novermber 11 last year, the Chinese travel marketplace sold over 500 million leisure travel packages, 300,000 air tickets and 150,000 hotel room nights.
“Travel is something that gives you a good experience, it’s a lifestyle,” said Sherri Wu, Chief Strategy Officer for Alitrip and Head of International Business Development for the Alibaba Group, speaking of Alitrip’s desire to promote customized travel for their customers.
“We have lots of data from last 16 years, and we use that data to develop customer products,” said Wu. But it doesn’t stop there. What they want to do is innovation, and they’re taking these services one step further. “Now the customer doesn’t even have to pay at check-in or checkout; Alitrip does it behind the scenes. It saves customers time and saves hotels front desk labor.” Not only that, Alitrip is looking at the sharing economy and opportunities there as well, for example how to connect night tour operators with consumers who want to visit the Eiffel Tower or other tours at night.
Meanwhile, Rakuten’s Yamamoto looks ahead at the possibilities with data. How can they serve customers who are looking for a hotel not just to sleep at but to sleep with? Online marketplaces are at a huge advantage with their wealth of user data on user preferences. Rakuten even has real time ‘internet travel consultants’ who try and support consumers and reduce the amount of mismatch, making good on their claim to match users to the best hotel possible.
“If we do the best match, the result is high user satisfaction. User reviews are not only rating hotel services, but also judging the OTA’s matching quality,” he emphasized. “We’ve achieved only 20-30% of what we could do with the big data, what we could do is more than what we’re doing right now.”
But when asked on Rakuten’s acquisition of Voyagin, Yamamoto said: “We integrated Voyagen because it’s fun. We needed to remind ourselves that travel is fun, and to remind ourselves to be a fun company.”
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