In 2023, the transaction volume of Douyin wine tourism may reach 60 billion
In the past, college students organized a group to go to Zibo to eat barbecue, and then there were small potatoes in the south who bravely entered the Harbin Ice and Snow World. In 2023, the domestic tourism market has ushered in a peak of traffic again and again.
As a national app with more than 700 million monthly active users, Douyin has played a major role in this process, not only as an important content promotion platform, but also as an online travel trading platform.
BOCOM International predicts that the scale of Douyin's local life services will reach 250 billion yuan in 2023, of which the GMV of wine and tourism will reach 60 billion, nearly a quarter of Meituan's;
In 2024, the GMV of Douyin wine tourism will reach 90 billion, which is about 28% of Meituan's, and the gap between the two will be further narrowed.
In terms of market share, Douyin is expected to increase its market share from 2% to 3% in 2023, Ctrip increased by 5 percentage points, Meituan fell by 3 points, and Fliggy fell by 1 point.
Source: BOCOM International Forecast
At the same time, analysts also predict that the market share of Douyin wine tourism will increase by another 1 percentage point in 2024, while other players will either decline slightly or struggle to maintain it.
Douyin has entered the hospitality market strongly, and has begun to squeeze the market share of other players, and its GMV scale is about to match Fliggy.
It is understood that the wine tourism business mainly refers to tourism projects such as hotel accommodation and attraction tickets. Compared with high-consumption but low-profit businesses such as food delivery and bicycle sharing, the hospitality business tends to be more profitable, and once consumption habits are established through the app, the revenue can be higher.
And Douyin has long been eyeing this piece of fat. With the development of short video platforms and the continuous expansion of user coverage, Douyin is now trying to overtake in corners through the traffic advantage of content platforms.
In the past year, Douyin Life Service has invested more and more money and traffic in the hospitality business through various platform subsidies and marketing activities.
In May 2023, Douyin Life Service officially announced the launch of the calendar room function, which supports hotel booking on Douyin, not limited to live broadcast rooms and short videos. The move is seen as a key move by Douyin in its aggressive assault on Online Travel Agency (OTAs).
Douyin hotel booking Source: Douyin Life Service Business Observation Official Account
In June, Douyin Life Service announced the launch of the "Good Travel Festival", a big promotion IP for wine and tourism, to help wine and tourism businesses achieve business growth by combining travel scenarios such as peripheral travel and long-term travel.
In July, Douyin Life Service adjusted its departmental structure and upgraded its hospitality business to a subordinate first-level department, which is parallel to the in-store business (including in-store catering and in-store integration).
During last year's Double 11, the number of orders for wine and tourism on the Douyin platform increased by 9 times year-on-year, and half a year after Zibo barbecue came out of the circle, it still drove the National Day holiday wine and tourism consumption orders to increase by nearly 14 times compared with the week before the National Day, higher than the national average of 7.7.
The relevant person in charge of Douyin Life Service's hospitality business once said that planting, placing orders, and punching in on short video platforms has increasingly become a user habit.
At present, the hospitality business is becoming a sharp blade for Douyin to attack the local life market.
The hospitality market is showing new changes
The China Tourism Academy predicts that the number of domestic tourists in China will reach 5.407 billion in 2023, and domestic tourism revenue will reach 5.2 trillion yuan, recovering to 90% and 91% of 2019 levels, respectively.
With the full liberalization of the market last year, the tourism industry has recovered rapidly, and at the same time, tourism users are increasingly pursuing the stability of travel, and online travel has gradually become the mainstream track.
In the third quarter of last year, Ctrip's net profit increased by 16 times, while the net profit of Tongcheng Travel increased by 146.5% year-on-year.
In addition to the top enterprises making a lot of money, content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu are also accelerating the layout of the wine and tourism market and further expanding the capacity of the online tourism market.
In the past year, it has become a trend to follow the hot spots of the Internet. Content platforms are an important medium to drive this trend.
Taking the recent explosion in Harbin as an example, the number of readings on related topics has skyrocketed on major short video platforms, most of which are spontaneously participated in discussions and forwarded by users. There are also many provincial and municipal users who have begun to shout local cultural tourism accounts on major platforms, seizing the time to promote tourism resources and further pushing up the peak traffic.
According to "Douyin Ice and Snow Big Data", in December last year, the number of searches in Harbin exceeded 53.35 million, a year-on-year increase of 308%, and the orders for Harbin Douyin wine tourism increased by 144 times year-on-year.
Source: Douyin Life Service
Nowadays, platforms such as Douyin have become an important way for local cultural tourism accounts to attract tourists. Not only tourist destinations, but also many tourism businesses and influencers have also seen this traffic dividend in advance, and have carried out content layout on major platforms as early as possible.
According to the data, as of September 2023, a total of 14,000 scenic spots and more than 100,000 hotels have opened official accounts on Douyin, and the number of official accounts of travel agencies on the Douyin platform exceeds 32,000.
In 2023, the number of live broadcasts on Douyin hotel accounts will increase month by month, with an increase of 111% in September compared to January, and the number of live broadcasts watched by users in the third quarter will increase by 34% compared to the first quarter.
At the same time, in 2023, the number of Xiaohongshu travel experts will increase by 672% year-on-year, and the number of tourism professional accounts will increase by 1221% year-on-year. Kuaishou has more than 220 million interactive users, including more than 350,000 creators of wine and tourism.
Douyin and Xiaohongshu are becoming important platforms for consumers to make travel decisions, which is also forcing established OTA platforms to focus on content and rebuild their competitive edges.
At last year's Global Partner Summit, Liang Jianzhang pointed out that Ctrip's future development direction is to innovate around "AI, content, and ESG" to achieve sustainable growth.
In recent years, Ctrip's platform has also continued to add graphics, short videos, live broadcasts and other content. Ctrip data shows that in 2023, the number of viewers in Ctrip's live broadcast room will increase by 150% year-on-year.
Just recently, Ctrip also reached a strategic cooperation with Kuaishou, which allows Kuaishou users to directly book travel products such as scenic spot tickets on the platform, and can enjoy the services provided by Ctrip. The two parties are committed to finding more business increments for hospitality merchants and releasing greater platform dividends.
In addition, as a big competitor of Douyin in the field of local life, Meituan is also very hard at working in the hospitality business.
As early as 2022, Meituan has already set up an independent live broadcast team and smashed a lot of resources and traffic tilt. Since last year, the official account of Meituan Wine Tourism has also enabled a large number of digital people to start batch live broadcasts, which can reduce the cost of live broadcasts compared with live broadcasts.
The content platform provides new ideas for the development of the tourism market. Under the general trend of online travel, major platforms are looking for their own optimal solutions.
Douyin's hospitality business still faces challenges
Now Douyin has won a small piece of the cake in the wine and tourism market with its traffic advantage, but it still faces more problems and challenges if it wants to expand further.
In the tourism market, platforms such as Ctrip, Meituan, and Tongcheng have firmly controlled the supply of upstream hotels and attractions after years of accumulation, and have also monopolized the bargaining power of most suppliers in the market. In this regard, there is still a big gap between Douyin, which has just entered the game, and these platforms.
At present, Douyin's development strategy in terms of wine and tourism is still based on "low prices". Through subsidies, service providers and tourism merchants are attracted to settle in, and then users are attracted to consume and place orders through low-cost group buying.
It is reported that in December last year, the top 10 hotels on the Douyin platform were purchased in groups, and it was found that except for Hilton, which was relatively expensive, the others belonged to economy hotels: Hanting, Homeinns, All Seasons, and Orange.
If Douyin wants to create its own tourism commodity shelf scene, it needs a steady stream of merchant supply and user traffic, the latter is already quite large-scale, and it is difficult to find it in the former.
Last year, Meituan further strengthened its control over the resources of the scenic spot, adopting an "underwriting" strategy to cover all ticket sales in the scenic spot, and Meituan was responsible for the profit and loss.
At the same time, Meituan has also vigorously developed special group buying, which will support merchants who are willing to provide the lowest prices on the whole network with huge traffic.
Douyin's progress in local life is constantly being chased and blocked by veteran players.
It is worth noting that Douyin's biggest shortcoming in terms of wine and tourism is the write-off rate. Compared with GMV, the wine and tourism industry attaches more importance to GTV, that is, write-off flow. To put it simply, users can generate GTV only when they consume at the corresponding hotel attractions after purchasing group purchase coupons, which is also the real conversion level of the platform.
According to data from Jiuqian Zhongtai, Meituan's write-off rate is more than 85%, and the overall write-off rate of Douyin life services (on-site catering + in-store comprehensive + wine tourism) is only about 60%.
According to industry practice, the actual write-off rate of in-store catering and in-store comprehensive is generally higher than that of wine tourism, which means that the actual write-off rate of Douyin wine tourism is lower than 60%.
According to a research report by Guojin Securities, more than 20% of users will write off the contract within 2 days after users purchase group purchase coupons, while on Douyin, only about 10% of users can fulfill the contract within 2 days.
Although Douyin's commission rate for wine and tourism merchants is lower, at 3%-6%, Meituan's write-off rate is higher, which means that the merchant's income is more stable.
Nowadays, in the traffic pool of Douyin, there are many people who come to dig gold, but there are still a few people who can really dig gold. According to the research of Guojin Securities, about 40% of the wine and tourism orders on the Douyin platform once belonged to only the top 5% of merchants.
On the track of wine tourism, Douyin still has a long way to go.
Author | Pandora