This week’s podcast is about my visit to Trip.com in Shanghai.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to our Tech Tours.

Here is the Trip.com HQ.

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Related articles:

• GenAI Playbook (Step 3): How to Build Barriers to Entry with Intelligence Capabilities (9 of 10) (Tech Strategy)
• Why ChatGPT and Generative AI Are a Mortal Threat to Disney, Netflix and Most Hollywood Studios (Tech Strategy – Podcast 150)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Personalization
• Marketplace Platform

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Trip.com / ctrip / Qunar / Skyscanner

———transcription below

Episode 234 – ctrip.1

Jeffrey Towson: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome, everybody. My name is Jeff Towson, and this is the tech strategy podcast from TechMoat Consulting and the topic for today, three lessons from my visit to trip. com. Now, about a month ago, I was in Shanghai and I went out to the west side, which is Hongqiao, which is a big airport, major rail area.

And also out in this area is a trip. com, which In China, it’s referred to as Ctrip or Xiecheng. It also goes by Qunar, which is sort of the China version, but internationally, it’s Trip.com, and they have another brand, Skyscanner, which is just flight reservation. So, four brand names, but generally, people describe it as Trip.

com at this point. Anyways, I was out there, and I did sort of an informal visit. Nothing,, nothing formal with management or anything like that, just sort of looking around, [00:01:00] chatting with some people, things like that,, getting up to speed. And it’s a really cool company. I’ve been following this company for a long, long time.

I think in terms of online travel agencies, sort of, Hospitality aggregators and consolidators. I think it’s the best one globally. I think it’s much better than Expedia and these others, far more advanced in terms of its capabilities. It’s my favorite one to use. I use it whenever I can. So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about why that is.

And also. They have had a pretty spectacular 12 months where their revenue rebounded dramatically. This is all sort of, a lot of this is post COVID rebound, but the last 12 months, the revenue, the DAUs, all the numbers really jumped. So, I thought I’d talk about that and that’ll be the topic for today., standard disclaimer, nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice.

The numbers and information from you and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions [00:02:00] expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment legal or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the topic. Now, I don’t really have, um, too many concepts for today, sort of just basic stuff.

Obviously, Ctrip is a marketplace platform, so that’s important. And, I think, within a lot of the stuff they’re doing, personalization, um, it’s kind of a big lever they’ve been leaning on, both in terms of their services, a lot of bundling, cross selling, content, which they’re, they’re doing a lot within content these days.

They have sort of user generated content, professionally generated content, which is very different than say like Expedia and others. And then also deals and promotions, which. I suspect is their biggest lever, but it’s hard to know behind the scenes. So, personalization would be sort of the other concept for today.

All right. Now this is a publicly traded company, [00:03:00] so you can pull the 10 Ks. Very interesting. I’ll go through the basics and then I’ll get to my sort of so what’s, which will be the three lessons., first one to think about. Okay. It’s a big, the phrase people use is like travel consolidator., some people call them like online travel agencies, demand aggregators.

I just consider them marketplace platforms for services focused on travel related services, which is obviously airlines, trains, planes. Now, Ctrip. I keep calling it Ctrip, but you know, they’ve gone quite a way down this path and I’ll get into all the other services they’ve added, which is pretty cool., but let me tell you how they describe themselves, which I think is.

Always helpful, and it’s usually at the front of the annual report. So, here’s how they describe themselves., this is literally page one of the, the annual report. Quote, we are a leading global [00:04:00] one stop travel platform, integrating a comprehensive suite of travel, travel products and services, and differentiated travel content.

So that’s interesting. Um, services for sure., but the differentiated travel content is interesting. Continuing on, we are the go-to destination for travelers in China and increasingly for travelers around the world. That’s actually a pretty good summary. Most of their business is coming from China and Asia.

So, they want to be global and they’re going global, but that’s where they live right now. Increasingly they’re trying to get into Europe and a couple other places. Okay, continuing on. To get inspired, make informed and cost-effective travel bookings, enjoy hassle free on the go support, and share travel experience.

That’s actually a pretty good summary of their main sort of [00:05:00] value proposition to a buyer which is overwhelmingly consumers, although they do have a corporate business as well, but it’s mostly consumers. That’s actually a pretty good list and I’ll talk about that shortly. Explore travel. Get inspired.

That has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve pivoted into content as of 2018., make informed and cost-effective travel bookings. Okay, that’s picking your flights and stuff, fine. Enjoy hassle free on the go support. Customer service is a big deal with this business. And then finally and share travel experiences.

That’s again them getting more into the content business. Anyways, then it goes on. Founded in 1999, listed, listed on Nasdaq,, in 2 0 0 3. So, a long time ago, but recently, 2021 on the Hong Kong Exchange., as mentioned, they have four brands, Ctrip trip.com, Skyscanner and Qunar. It’s [00:06:00] funny, the q and r is spelled Q-U-N-A-R.

So, and there’s a picture of like a, a camel, Qunar, but in Chinese, it’s basically a direct translation to Qunar, Qunali, where are you going? So, it’s kind of a Chinese phrase, where are you going? That’s been turned into an English word of some kind. Okay. So, they talk about their platform., I’ll go into that, um, but it’s pretty similar, but I like their language.

I think it’s, um, compelling. Okay. So going on, we can look at their financials. So, I’ll just give you the basic numbers. If you go, if you look at 2023 revenue total for the year, about 44 billion rem and B, which is about 6. 2 billion. Now that number is kind of important because 2021, 2022, they really got pummeled.

So, it took a, I mean, it really went down by about half in terms of revenue, but prior to [00:07:00] COVID, their revenue was about 35, 36 billion rem and B. Now, post COVID the first complete year, it’s about 44. So, if you look in the last 12 months, it’s like, wow, they’ve had amazing growth. Not really true, but up from three to four years ago, they’re, they’re steadily growing, which is nice.

When you break down their revenue, it’s about 40 percent is coming from accommodations. 40 percent coming from transportation ticketing, which is mostly airlines, but You know, there’s also buses and some trains and things outside of that. 7 percent comes from package tours, which is important. Um, 5 percent comes from corporate travel, which again would be mostly planes and trains and things, hotels.

And then they have a bucket of other 8%. That’s things like value added services, like insurance,, advertising, things like that on their website. So anyways, you get up to about 6. 2 billion in revenue for [00:08:00] 2023. And then you start to look at their profitability and it’s pretty great. I mean, it’s, it’s one of these businesses that is mostly a digital creature as opposed to, you know, having lots of dudes on scooters delivering packages or having big warehouses moving packages all around.

So,, gross profits, 82%. This is in 2023. But it’s basically the same as pre COVID, more or less, these percentages. So, they’re making like 82 80 percent gross profits. The big expense is obviously sales and marketing, which is about 20 percent been pretty stable product development, which is interesting about 27%.

That’s also been stable net operating profits, about 25 percent pretax. So yeah, very attractive in terms of numbers. They’re not an entirely digital creature because the big operating [00:09:00] entity they do have is call centers and customer service because. You need to have people ready on the phone for people who get cancelled and re booked and it’s got to be 24 7.

And the more global you get, the more difficult it gets because you have to have people with different language abilities. You know, when, when they were in China, okay, you could have all your call centers in China, which is what they did. But as you’ve gone to Asia, they’ve had to expand into places like Thailand and Malaysia.

Now they’ve got one in Edinburgh, English speaking. So, the customer service piece is kind of the, um, the fly in the ointment in terms of being a purely digital entity and the economics that that can generate, but generally speaking, it’s pretty attractive. And what else? Anything else? When you look at the numbers, um, hotels is kind of where the foundation is.

If you’re building a platform business model, [00:10:00] you need a lot on the merchant side. Now, when you talk about airlines, okay, we’re going to help you book with airlines. Well, they have 600 airlines or similar partners that they deal with. That’s not a very robust marketplace platform, but hotels and other types of accommodations, which You know, they focus more on boutique hotels now.

I assume they’re getting more and more into apartments as time goes by. That’s about 1. 6 million hotels according to them. Hotels, boutique hotels, accommodations. So that’s kind of the foundation of the Marketplace platform. Everything else sort of follows from that. Okay. Anything else? That’s kind of the basics.

Let me give you the other types of services they have, so as mentioned, 7 million, um, hotel partners, listings, things like that, airlines, more about 600, car rentals, obviously a big deal, bus operators, ferry [00:11:00] operators, those three or four buckets, cars, buses, ferries, and other types of travel agencies, if you wrap all those together, you get about 90, 000.

So that’s not an insignificant group of other types of merchants on the Marketplace platform. Okay. Now, that’s your Marketplace platform. Those are your user groups. So, you always start with the demand side now. What is their value proposition to customers? You know, the buyers. That’s usually where it starts.

, it’s not bad. It’s their proposition to customers, is kind of what I said, to explore, travel, to get inspired, to make informed decisions, to be hassle free, fine, fine, fine. They’ll talk about words like, we want to be personalized, convenient, enjoyable, and inspirational. That’s not bad language. The more [00:12:00] useful one is when they talk about how they compete with their competitors.

And the factors they cite. Our brand recognition, fine. Depth and breadth of travel offerings. So that’s your marketplace platform. Price competitiveness? Fine. User support and satisfaction? Okay. I think that’s pretty standard for a marketplace. The one that I think maybe I’ll put a little asterisk by is user support.

Because it’s a lot more complicated for this business than just shipping someone a package. All right, that’s the consumer side, the buyer side, not too,, shocking there. I think the pitch, the value proposition to their other user groups, which is their merchants, their suppliers, their airlines, they refer to all of this as their ecosystem partners, but you know, it’s basically accommodations, reservations, transport tickets.

package tours in destination activities, tour guides, when you go places, that whole group, the [00:13:00] value proposition to get that group on board is a big surprise. Number one, access to a global user base, right? We have the customers you aggregate on the demand side. The supply side usually will show up., giving them tech solutions.

Fine. Helping them establish their presence online. That’s interesting. And then the fourth is engage with users in real time. So, you can start to have direct relationships with them. Okay. I think that’s pretty, nothing shocking in there. What I think is interesting in this, now we’ll start to get into the so what’s a little bit, because that’s pretty standard marketplace platform for an OTA.

Since 2018, they’ve been rolling out content sharing, which is really as far as I can tell three things., the first is they have professionally generated content. If you go on trip. com, the first thing you will notice, it’s got videos all over the place. [00:14:00] It’s a lot more dynamic than your typical OTA. It looks a lot like something you’d expect coming out of China, more like a TikTok feel, a lot more going on.

So, they will have professionally generated content, PGC, and that’s a lot of Trip itself making commercials,, making deals,, here’s a special promotion we have this week, things like that. Um, on the other side, we have user generated content. People can upload videos. Here’s my trip. I’m in Paris. You can upload something in Chinese or whatever, um, which makes great sense.

I mean, I’ve always kind of wondered why. These OTA companies haven’t incorporated travel related content. Because it’s quite good. I watch travel videos all the time. And then in between that, they would have sort of PUGC, professional user generated content. I always make the analogy, that’s like Joe Rogan.

Right. Me, [00:15:00] a regular dude uploading content, that’s user generated content. Something coming out of Warner Brothers is professionally generated content. Joe Rogan is sort of professional user generated. It’s very professional, but it’s still one dude in the basement. Okay. For PUGC, which is actually fairly compelling for them,, that would be your travel bloggers.

That would be their, ecosystem partners. If their hotels want to make videos and put them, that would be a good place to do it. KOLs. If you have a nice hotel in Paris, you can invite a KOL, have them do a video in your hotel, post it up to trip.com.  , and tand’re basically looking for a couple things,  , to help people get inspired to help them share their travel experiences, but they’ve got a whole sort of content side to this business that I think is far ahead of anyone that I’ve seen doing this.

Um, so you’ve got [00:16:00] your news feed, which is free, of course, and increasingly personalized. Right. One of the big levers they’re pulling is personalized content and personalized promotions. Well, when you talk about personalization, content is usually the easiest place to go first. They do various recommendations.

Here’s somewhere you should think about going when you’re going there. Here are some themed activities you could do. Here’s a restaurant guide. Here’s a special deal for you., they’re increasingly doing live streaming, um, travel bloggers, ecosystem partners, things like that. And then you have the standard reviews and ratings and things like that.

So that is pretty interesting. Now, within all of that, what do I think really matters? I think personalization that ties to deals and promotions is probably the big lever. This could be for flights, it could be for package deals, [00:17:00] hotel plus flight plus trains, it could be for value added services, local tour guides, local restaurants, all of that.

So, content lets you lean, I think, a bit more into personalization, cross selling, and bundling. I kind of really like that as a strategy. Okay, I think that’s enough in terms of basics., anything else I want to talk about. One last little quick point., I’ve been talking a bit about digital attacker strategy that when you break into a new business, like online travel, you get some traction with a killer app, like get your hotel here, we have more bookings than anybody at a better price.

And once you get that wedge into a business as a digital attacker, then what you start to do is expand into complimentary services. So that’s how you get to hotels, to buses, to trains, to tour guides, to restaurants, all of that., that’s a pretty [00:18:00] standard strategy. I think it’s a really good strategy. I think they’ve been doing that for a long time, which is why they have this full suite of complimentary services related to travel.

And now they’ve added content on top of that. So, I think it’s a great strategy overall. And that is basically the basics here. I think I mentioned everything., they have nine call centers in Asia. One in Edinburgh. One thing they do have, which I think is interesting, they’ve opened in China a bunch of offline stores.

I’m going to send out an article on this to subscribers, and I’ll show you a picture of one of these from Shanghai. Little, they look like little travel stores. They’ve opened about 5, 700 of them in China. They do travel consultations; they give you local support and assistance. It looks like this is kind of a growth mechanism for going into lower tier cities.

I’m not 100 percent sure about that, but I think so. Okay, [00:19:00] let’s get into the key lessons. Okay, so lesson number one. Basically, nothing thrilling, continued global growth and expansion. Definitely 2023, 2024 looks good. We’ll see the official end of the year numbers fairly near future., yeah, basically it’s returned to pre COVID levels plus 20 percent at least.

And as mentioned, the economics look very good. We’ve seen those post COVID and pre COVID. They both look good. Some of the numbers I kind of heard when I was there were Things like the daily active users grew 70 percent year over year, like that was really interesting. Um, they’re having big sales days again.

They have quite a lot of sales day, which are interesting. Um, so they have their 11 11 in China, which is, you know, singles day. They have three [00:20:00] three March 3rd big one, but they also have end of the month sales, which are kind of like payday You know you get paid at the end of the month. Here’s our sales.

They have the end of the week sales They call it the weekly super sale, so they’re just seeing sort of growth Fairly solidly, and then they’ve got some interesting Sub areas that seem to be growing like they’re going after Europe. It looks like they’re leaning into train tickets as their wedge to get into that market a little more solidly.

I thought that was interesting. local attractions. So, you know, going to various concerts or festivals, things like that. They mentioned that has really been growing quite rapidly. So, it’s sort of this organic growth picture that looks quite good, but there’s definitely some standouts. Obviously, overseas Chinese is sort of, you know, a big line of growth into other parts of the world.

[00:21:00] Artist tours. Yeah. You know, they said artist tours and events up a hundred percent year over year. Anyways, that sounds good, but you got to keep in mind that like, you know, this is a COVID rebound as well. So that was kind of number one. I would call this just good organic global growth and you know, the number one thing I like about these businesses.

is their global platforms and they benefit from global network effects, which very few businesses actually get. So that’s pretty fantastic. My number two lesson, kind of the coolest thing that I came across is this focus on pre booking inspiration. Now, one of my one of my standard complaints about online travel agencies is they don’t get a lot of engagement.

People just don’t book tickets that often. And when they go, do go on tour, they don’t usually open the [00:22:00] app that you use to buy your ticket while you’re there. So, you might do a couple activities here and there, but you don’t really get significant ongoing engagement and you have a fairly low level of frequency.

Now I think content. really helps in that, especially personalized content., so I’ve kind of thought that for a while, content would be a great way for these OTAs to increase their monthly and daily active users and get more engagement, which means more data and things like that. But there was another idea that came out when I was visiting, which was a surprise.

The content that was mentioned was pre booking inspiration. So, I was thinking, okay, you book the ticket and then you maybe engage or not going forward, which is difficult. No, it’s like, no, no, no. We do it before we book the ticket. You know, you might get inspired to go somewhere by watching travel videos to a [00:23:00] certain country.

You might watch those for years, six months, a year. You might sort of keep those videos and watch them. And eventually you might buy a ticket. And. When this was being described, the company that came to mind was Pinterest. Pinterest, for those not familiar, you know, you, you basically create little project folders, like maybe you’re redecorating part of your house.

Maybe you’re doing a special dinner or something, but you create project folders and you look at various photos from designers and other things and you pin them almost like a bulletin board in your folder. And that’s it. You can go there to get inspiration. Ooh, how should I redecorate my bathroom? But also, as you start to, okay, I am going to decorate my bathroom.

Let’s start collecting ideas. You do all of that long before you pull the trigger. Okay, let’s hire a designer and let’s do it. So, I thought that was kind of an interesting analogy that travel sort of pre [00:24:00] inspiration, pre travel, pre booking is a really interesting place to focus on for engagement. And you can basically make it like a Pinterest.

It can increasingly be personalized and experience. Um, and then of course you can hit them with promotions and deals if you want to sort of trigger them to buy. But yeah, I thought that was really kind of great. Um, now one of the things I was thinking about was, is that the reason they were getting more DAUs?

Because they had a pretty big jump in DOs. I suspect not. I think it was more about just content in general. I think it was a post COVID bump. And I suspect they’re doing a tremendous amount of brand deals, promotions. Um, and when I actually looked into this more, it’s important when you look at businesses, because I like all the strategy stuff.

I like thinking about these things. But at the end of the day, you kind of got to know, like, look, what’s the big [00:25:00] lever here? There’s 20 things going on here. What’s the two things that really matter? Is content really that important? Or is it just kind of nice and cool? If I had to guess what I think the biggest lever is, I think it’s deals and promotions.

And the more you can make those personalized, the better. So, they do lots and lots of that. And if you’re living in Asia, you will see Trip. com advert, brand advertisements everywhere. Like go to the airport anywhere, Singapore, Bangkok, look at the walls. You’ll see Trip. com brand ads all over the place. But if you’re on any sort of news feed in Asia,, you’ll get Ctrip deals all the time.

So, if I had to guess, I’d say that’s the biggest lever. And the other stuff, the pre booking inspiration, the content, the user generated content,, the bundling, that’s all [00:26:00] good too. I just don’t think it’s in the top two or three. But that’s a guess. I’m, I’m not totally sure. And that’s okay. Um, you want to do all those things, but it’s nice to know what the big lever is.

Alright. Third lesson., last one, generative AI, it’s definitely moving within this space OTAs. It doesn’t strike me as a game changer at this point. So, you have a marketplace platform, Alibaba, Lazada. What are they going to be doing for generative AI right now? You hear the same story over and over. We are going to give tools to our merchants to make them more productive.

And efficient and content generation marketing is going to be big in that productivity tools for our merchants help them better communicate and personalize with our customers. Fine. Big surprise. You kind of hear the same thing from Cedric,, you know, [00:27:00] tools for merchants and other people to use. Fine.

The other thing you tend to hear on marketplace platforms is, and we are increasingly going to give tools to customers, um, like chat bots. That’s what Lazzichat would be at Lazada. Now, the ones that was mentioned for Ctrip were,, planning tools for planning your trip, making travel guides, that’s kind of interesting, creating itineraries for your trip.

Okay, interesting. The one that actually got my attention was something in their annual report called the Virtual Tour Assistant. Where I guess when you’re on your trip, you can have a virtual tour assistant going along with you now That actually could be kind of interesting like maybe not this year But maybe in a couple years where suddenly you fly to Paris and you’ve never been to Paris and suddenly you have a virtual [00:28:00] tour Assistant with you talking with you all the time Taking you around Paris recommending restaurants now You could argue that Google or someone else could do this But one thing trip.

com does have is 25 years’ worth of travel data. They have a massive proprietary data set that very few people have for global travel. So, if you were to guess who’s going to create the greatest virtual travel companion, yeah, it might be them. So anyways, I thought those were all kind of cool. I’m going to keep an eye on it.

They didn’t strike me as changing the competitive dynamics of this business yet. Um, so upgrades. not major disruptions would be how I would put it. Anyways, those are kind of my three takeaways from this., you know, the growth looks good and its global growth of a marketplace platform that can has global network [00:29:00] effects.

That’s about my favorite type of network effect., number two, you know, this idea that pre booking inspiration and personalized content is a really fairly compelling sort of adjacency that they’ve been building on over the last four to five years. Within all of that, I think deals and promotions are probably the big lever.

And then final port generative AI is definitely moving. I’m going to keep an eye on it. It looks cool. So far, it doesn’t look like a game changer. Anyways, it was a pretty great trip. I really enjoyed the visit. If you haven’t seen, I’ll put some pictures in the show notes for, it’ll be in subscribers, but it’ll be on the webpage as well.

So, if you click over from the podcast to the webpage, I’ll put some pictures of the campus. which is really a cool looking campus. Basically, the buildings all look like trains. They look like gigantic 15 or 20 story high trains, the [00:30:00] shape with bridges in between them. It’s a really cool campus., so anyways, that’s great.

I’m going to try and, um, hopefully do some formal visits with them in the next couple of months, maybe February, March. We’ll see if we can make that happen, but I think it’s. You know, I’ve, I’ve kind of said there’s, there’s always a couple of companies coming out of China that I don’t think get nearly enough attention because I think they’re very compelling.

Ant Financial’s one,, Trip. com is the other. You know, that’s kind of my standard answer to that question. So yeah, if you’ve got time, I think it’s worth taking a peek at it. If nothing else, it’ll give you a really good idea of where Expedia and Booking and the others are likely to go in the next several years, because I think they are ahead.

And I would put Airbnb on that list as well, which is a pretty cool company also. Anyways, that was kind of my trip. As for me, it’s, I’m still in Northern California for a couple more days, then heading back to Asia pretty quick, and then off to [00:31:00] Paris and Europe for a couple weeks. So, I’m looking forward to that.

It’s been a pretty good Christmas, just hanging out with the family. A lot of politics. People are talking politics, at least in my family, which is, um, it’s not usually the case. And I suspect that’s not abnormal. I think a lot of Americans are talking politics right now because it’s,, it’s been probably more than Americans, probably a lot of the world because it’s been pretty crazy in the U.

1. in this election cycle. So, the funniest one for me is, the recent sort of pitch by President Trump, he’s president elect, but it sure looks like he’s the president. It’s very weird. I’ve never seen this before in my lifetime where the person who wins the election. Just becomes the president that day and nobody’s waiting till January 20th.

That’s, that’s not normal. But he threw out an idea of let’s make Canada the 51st state. Which,, I’m technically [00:32:00] Canadian as well. So, I don’t think that’s a great idea. But I think it’s a great conversation to have. Like, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t think Canada should do that, but I think there’s probably I think it’s a great way to open a discussion and there is probably a spectacularly good win win deal to be made between Canada and the US right now, like, okay, you’re not a state, but you get special status like Puerto Rico and some others have special status.

You get all these benefits., your taxes come way down, citizens can do things across the border a lot easier. The U. S. gets access to, I don’t know, Alberta resources, I mean, there’s probably a really spectacularly good deal for both sides within there. And if I had to guess, which I’m just guessing, I suspect that’s what Trump is doing because he’s, you know, he always throws out these outrageous [00:33:00] first ideas, but then it’s just an opening bid for something else that he really wants.

So, there might be something underneath that sort of crazy idea that he actually wants that makes sense. So, anyways, I’m hoping, I’m hoping the countries have the discussion. I think that would be really, really interesting. Anyways, that’s what we’ve been talking about the last couple of days, so who knows, we’ll see.

Anyways, that is it for me, I hope everyone is doing well,, have a great new year and I will, actually I’ll probably do a podcast before the new year, so,, have a great weekend and I’ll talk to you close to the new year, bye bye.

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

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