Not long ago, Zhou Hang, the founder of Easy to Use Car, joined Cao Cao Travel and served as chairman and legal person. In addition, the internal management of Cao Cao Travel has also undergone a major change of blood. For the changes in the organization of Cao Cao's travel, Ding Daoshi, a veteran Internet observer, believes that this may be the company's preparation for the development direction of the new era.
Recently, Cao Cao Travel was alleged by the media that passengers were deducted 116 yuan for 6 kilometers of online ride-hailing Cao Cao's travel drivers added 100 yuan in mental loss fees. According to Jiupai News, the matter has been resolved at present, and the platform has reached a settlement with the passengers. In addition, the 100 yuan surcharge has long been refunded to the passengers, and the platform has added some compensation fees to him.
In the ever-changing field of online ride-hailing, in the face of various problems such as compliance, user experience, and profitability, can Cao Cao Travel still write a different story?
Frequent penalties and compliance issues?
According to the data, Cao Cao Travel was established in 2015, backed by Geely, and the operating body is Hangzhou Youxing Technology Co., Ltd., which is an Internet + new energy travel platform invested by Geely Group.
According to media reports, the founding team of Cao Cao Travel has long been greatly changed, and the original founding team has basically all left. Liu Jinliang, the former chairman and president of Geely Technology Group Co., Ltd., changed his position from chairman to director of Cao Cao Travel, and Li Donghui, CEO of Geely Holding Group, Dong Kainan, former general manager of Cao Cao Travel, and Zhang Yi, director of Cao Cao Travel, have all withdrawn.
At the same time as the personnel turmoil, the industry is no longer what it used to be. Under such circumstances, Cao Cao Travel has been repeatedly fined for "inducing drivers who have not obtained permits to carry out illegal operations" and other reasons, can Cao Cao successfully survive the transition period of the asset-heavy model?
According to the public information of Tianyancha, as of April 18, 2022, there were 1,229 judicial risks involving Hangzhou Youxing Technology Co., Ltd., the parent company of CaoCao Travel, of which 430 were related to litigation and 286 were legal proceedings. Among them, "providing operating services for people who have not obtained a taxi driver's license to drive taxis" has become one of the important reasons for Cao Cao's punishment.
In addition, Cao Cao Travel has been interviewed by the government four times, the most recent interview was in November 2021, the Shenzhen Municipal Public Transport Administration gave the reason for the interview: offline solicitation and other marketing methods, vicious competition, recruiting or inducing drivers who have not obtained permits to carry out illegal operations, disrupting the order of the public screen competition market, affecting the safety and stability of the industry, and harming the legitimate rights and interests of drivers and passengers.
It is worth noting that according to media reports, Tianyancha data shows that on November 1 alone, Cao Cao Travel added 8 new administrative penalties, with a total fine of 80,000 yuan, and the reasons for punishment were illegal acts of driving taxis to provide operating services for people who did not obtain a taxi driver's license.
According to the Blue Whale report, being punished multiple times in one day is the "norm" of Cao Cao's travel.
According to public information, caocao's current upper-tier cities have exceeded 50 cities, and there are about 19 cities that have obtained online reservation taxi business licenses, including Hangzhou, Ningbo, Nanjing, Beijing, Shenzhen, etc., which is less than half of the total cities on the line.
From the perspective of compliance rate, according to the statistics of the national online ride-hailing regulatory information exchange platform, as of October 31, 2021, the compliance rate of Caocao travel orders was only 61.5%, although it increased slightly by 4.4%, but it was still at a low level. In 2021, the Nanjing Transportation Department announced the compliance of 7 online ride-hailing platforms from October 18 to 31, and Cao Cao Travel is still ranked at the bottom according to the comprehensive ranking of order compliance rate, vehicle compliance rate and driver compliance rate.
Although Cao Cao Travel has always emphasized the need for "compliance", it also said that Cao Cao Chauffeur has a mature driver training mechanism. The "Cao Cao Academy" will provide services, communication, first aid and other professional knowledge, and even every driver must undergo a personality test before taking up his post.
But according to Blue Whale, previously, a driver of Cao Cao Travel said that the Cao Cao Travel platform is divided into many small companies, relatively scattered, usually there is not so much training, just send some notices or rewards in the WeChat group and other content. Another driver said that the company will require drivers to learn relevant content on their mobile phones, but unlike other parts of the online ride-hailing platform, which require monthly offline meetings.
Chen Liteng, an e-commerce analyst for life services at the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economic Society, once said that platforms such as Cao Cao Travel have gathered a large number of drivers, and it is necessary to strengthen the safety training for drivers. For the platform, first of all, we must recognize the importance and necessity of safety training, and secondly, we must implement it in practical actions and do not engage in formalism.
How to improve the passenger and driver experience?
In 2016, the "Guiding Opinions on Deepening Reform and Promoting the Healthy Development of the Taxi Industry" was launched, which established the legal status of the online ride-hailing platform. Within a year, the compliance policies and market entities of the online ride-hailing industry will be implemented at the same time.
Taking the Beijing market, which is fiercely contested by online ride-hailing platforms, as an example, the policy requires drivers to hold Beijing household registration and driving certificates issued by Beijing Municipality, which means that the threshold for compliant drivers is extremely high, which means that only more professional and compliant enterprises will have more market gaps to break through.
While emphasizing compliance, Cao Cao Chuxing has adopted the B2C asset-heavy operation mode of "new energy vehicles + bus public operation + certified drivers" since the beginning of the launch, the vehicle adopts Geely new energy vehicles, and the drivers are uniformly recruited and trained. The advantage of this asset-heavy self-operation model lies in the unified management of vehicles and drivers by enterprises, and the safety of travel and passenger services are guaranteed. However, the high operating costs have made it difficult to make a profit, because CaoCao Travel has to inspect each vehicle annually and hand over the operation insurance every year.
The industry view is that this asset-heavy model is making its profitability a long way off, and it also makes drivers unable to withstand the corresponding cost pressure.
According to a financial report by China Visit network, a person from Cao Cao said, "After becoming an operating vehicle, buying insurance, scrapping life, etc. will increase the platform fee, for example, the vehicle will be forced to scrap within 6 years of driving 600,000 kilometers, so the driver cost is high." ”
In addition, Cao Cao Travel has also made adjustments to the proportion of driver commissions, which has caused many storms recently. According to the financial information of China Visit Network, the adjustment is mainly in three aspects: one is that the percentage of the draw will increase from the original 20% to 23%; the second is that each order will be charged a basic information service fee of 5 cents; third, the reward policy will be adjusted from 23 orders within 24 hours to 33 orders in 4 periods.
The report pointed out that a number of Cao Cao travel driver masters complained, "Usually running ten thousand yuan and having an income of five thousand, it is good to have four thousand now", "7 o'clock in the morning to 9 o'clock to complete 9 orders, this is an almost impossible task."
According to the Daily Economic Report, after Master Wang, the driver of Cao Cao's trip, completed the third business, the payment price displayed on the passenger end was 37.11 yuan, while the income price displayed by Master Wang's driver did not reach 28 yuan. "This (running online car) does not make money, you have to run 14 hours a day, it is a pit, a day to throw away the fuel money and car money (flowing water) is not much left." Unless the oil price drops to 5 or 6 yuan (per liter) before, it will not be done until the contract of this year is completed. ”
On the passenger side, there are also many problems in Cao Cao's travel. According to the Blue Whale report, the Blue Whale reporter found that the problem of inaccurate navigation positioning built into the platform was highlighted in the process of using the Cao Cao travel platform. For example, in a park gate to locate a car, the driver will go around to a building in the same direction in the park, and when locating a ride in a shopping mall, the navigation guides the driver to the no-stop area, but the APP end does not have a no-stop reminder.
Caijing Network Technology noted that on the black cat complaint platform, some passengers complained that "took a taxi, waited for an hour and did not come to pick up, customer service directly interrupted contact", "Cao Cao Travel has been sending unpaid information and even calling after I completed the payment", "Cao Cao Travel platform randomly located the pick-up address", "Cao Cao Travel arbitrarily deducted the cancellation fee" and so on.
As of April 20, 2022, there were as many as 3,228 complaints about Cao Cao Travel on the Black Cat complaint platform.
Chen Liteng told the media that the improvement of user experience requires continuous upgrading of infrastructure, providing more accurate services through technology iteration and software upgrades, in addition to strengthening the training of drivers' service awareness and regular personnel training.
Where is the way forward?
Perhaps seeing the problems that heavy assets may bring, since February 2019, Cao Cao Chuxing has begun to try to expand the business of hitchhiking and driving, but the industry believes that in the C2C field dominated by Didi for many years, Cao Cao has no sense of existence so far.
After March last year, Cao Cao Chuxing has also launched a number of power-changing models, hoping to seize market share through this customized model with higher operational efficiency and lower operating costs. However, the industry view is that behind the power exchange model is still a high investment risk, especially the current construction cost of the power exchange station is not low.
In addition, CaoCao Travel will also introduce O2O e-commerce in the same city into the travel platform, behind which is the business design of users traveling - accumulating mileage - in exchange for e-commerce discounts. The industry believes that this needs to occupy a sufficient share and maintain a high user stickiness in order to send user flow to the e-commerce business, and if there is no subsidy policy, user loyalty may decline significantly.
At present, according to the data given by Cao Cao Travel, about 20% of the 62 cities that have operated have reached a market share of 20%. If you want to break through the 20% life and death line, it means that the scale of market fees will expand, and it will be difficult to make a profit in the short term.
On the one hand, the entire online ride-hailing market is facing the ceiling of the growth of the unit price of passengers, and the price of a single order of the online ride-hailing car must strictly follow a specific consumption level; on the other hand, there is also a ceiling on the commission ratio of the platform, and the platform will lead to the loss of transportation capacity by squeezing the profits of the drivers.
This means that with the online ride-hailing business alone, it is difficult for Cao Cao Chuxing to achieve the goal of profitability. Previously, Didi left a window period for each online booking platform in the "aphasia" stage, and how to find a feasible business model during the window period is a problem that Cao Cao Travel needs to solve.
Today, more companies are pouring into the ride-hailing market. According to the statistics of the national online ride-hailing regulatory information exchange platform, there were 4 new online ride-hailing platform companies in March this year, an increase of 3 in February, an increase of 2 in January, and a new number of 44 in the whole of last year. By the end of March, 267 ride-hailing platform companies had obtained licenses for ride-hailing platforms.
At a time when the competition in the industry is becoming more and more fierce, compliance rate, user experience, profit model, etc. are all urgent problems to be solved by Cao Cao Travel. If you want to retain drivers and users, perhaps as Chen Liteng said before, all online ride-hailing platforms should not "sacrifice their lives and end" when competing for market share, whether in compliance or user service experience need to make sufficient efforts.
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