Ctrip CEO Sun Jie: Ctrip's overseas orders are expected to gradually recover in the second half of this year

The Paper's reporter Tang Yingying

On March 29, Sun Jie, CEO of Ctrip Group (NASDAQ:TCOM), publicly stated that the number of Ctrip's overseas orders is expected to gradually recover in the second half of this year and return to 2019 levels by the end of 2022.

Sun Jie pointed out that the year-on-year decline in global arrivals in 2020 is very significant, from 1.461 billion in 2019 to 380 million, returning to the level of 30 years ago. However, Sun Jie believes: "Although the challenge is huge, in our opinion, this will be an unprecedented and very good opportunity for us." ”

Macao's tourism is expected to fully resume by the end of this year

According to Ctrip's overseas orders since 2018, Sun Jie believes that China's Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, "Japan and South Korea", "Singapore-Malaysia" and the United States and Europe will become the preferred outbound travel destinations for customers.

Among them, Sun Jie expects that if the epidemic is further controlled, Macao is expected to fully recover by the end of this year; Hong Kong is expected to reach or even exceed the level of 2019 by the end of 2022; and the United States will also reach the pre-epidemic level in 2022.

In the face of the upcoming cross-border travel market and several major "pain points" in the current tourism industry in marketing, Ctrip Group released the "Tourism Marketing Hub" strategy on the same day. In simple terms, the strategy uses Ctrip's "Planet" as a carrier to aggregate traffic, content and goods, becoming a new trading platform for merchants, sharing content and "bringing goods" while obtaining private domain traffic.

Liang Jianzhang, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Ctrip Group, said that this is the focus of Ctrip's entire company operations for some time to come.

In Liang Jianzhang's view, the current pain point of the industry is "not enough customers", because of the impact of the epidemic, travel is restricted.

"At least domestically, these restrictions have been lifted. But it's not enough, everyone wants more. Liang Jianzhang continued that another pain point is that "everyone doesn't know where to go."

"Now the destinations that are not marketed in the world cannot be reached, and the rest are destinations that need to be marketed very much." They want to tell us we can go, why should we go? How to get there? What can I play? We as guests will be stimulated to more travel opportunities, and the entire industry will be driven. Liang Jianzhang said that in the past period of time, and for a period of time in the future, what Ctrip has to do is to do a good job in marketing, marketing a lot of content, including traffic, management content, commodity management and so on.

In the future, tourism advertising may become a new track in the industry

Fastdata pole related research data show that in 2021, with the recovery of China's tourism industry and the increase in the intensity of tourism suppliers' advertising investment, it is expected that the annual scale of China's tourism advertising market will reach 80-100 billion yuan, and future tourism advertising will become a new "100 billion track" for the tourism industry.

Liang Jianzhang pointed out that the pain points in tourism marketing include content dispersion and fragmentation; content and traffic cannot be accurately matched; content and commodity are disconnected; merchants have awakened private domain operation ceremonies, but the self-operation efficiency is low; and the lack of one-stop traffic, content and commodity management tools.

"For example, a while ago I went to a social media to see content, search for travel or search for something, read a lot of content, brush I will look at the beauty to go, see more other content that can catch your time and eyeballs, I suddenly deviated from this theme, and I really wanted to do what I forgot." In addition, (content) and goods do not match, sometimes we see the content is very beautiful, but to book a ticket has been booked, the hotel has long been fully booked, or this time there is a particularly expensive one, so the content and the product are out of touch. Liang Jianzhang believes that it is very inefficient for guests to find a suitable destination.

"In general, there is no corresponding integration of traffic, content, and goods, and there is no temporary and efficient matching tool, so this is the marketing hub we want to launch, match and manage these three efficiently, and efficiently match and manage traffic, content, and goods."

Liang Jianzhang cited his live broadcast since March 2020 as an example: "Our live broadcast is the most typical, not only produce content, but also produce a lot of pre-sale transactions, we have tens of millions (RMB, the same below) and hundreds of millions of transactions this year, and the total brings 5 billion transactions, basically hotels and destinations." ”

More than half of Ctrip's new users in 2021 will be under the age of 25

In 2020, due to the impact of the epidemic and the collapse of the global tourism industry, Ctrip has started from "live broadcasting" since the end of March 2020 to sell tourism products. According to data disclosed by Ctrip in its 2020 annual financial results, as of the end of 2020, Ctrip's content channels contributed twice as much to Ctrip's APP traffic as at the beginning of the year, and the access time of information flow increased by more than 200% compared with the beginning of the year. In 2020, Ctrip's live broadcast and special channels contributed a total of about 5 billion yuan in transactions.

It can be seen that Ctrip's new strategy may be more in line with the "young" and "high-income" groups, and this group is also the most willing to "spend money for tourism" at present.

Sun Bo, executive vice president of Ctrip Group, pointed out that among Ctrip's new customers every year, the proportion of people under the age of 25 has soared. More than half of Ctrip's new users in 2021 will be under the age of 25. This increase is not only reflected in the number of people booking products, but also in the consumption power and activity and transaction frequency. At the same time, third-party data disclosed by Ctrip shows that the proportion of people with monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan who migrate to Ctrip from competitors or other non-online travel platforms is also increasing year by year.

Sun Bo also revealed that as of March 2021, Ctrip's demand for domestic travel has greatly exceeded expectations. "Compared to the same period in 2019, we have seen growth peaks of more than 50% in many of our business lines and more than 200% in new businesses.

Editor-in-Charge: Liu Xiuhao

Proofreader: Yan Zhang