Now the big question is, when will Chinese outbound restart?
THIS time last year, in the darkest days of travel, Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group, recalled that it was having to process up to RMB5 billion of refunds a day, with no sight of whether it would be repaid or when the pandemic would end.
“It was very difficult,” she said of the first quarter of 2020 during the WiT & TravelDaily: Bridging China & Asia event, organised with TravelDaily, on March 11. “We were offering full refunds without even knowing if the airlines or hotels would be paying us back. Our team worked really hard to make sure banks were standing with us and giving us lines of credit to make sure our customers’ interests were protected in a difficult year.”
It also launched a RMB1 billion Partnership Fund to help its partners to get through the difficult times and management took zero salary while its vice presidents volunteered a 50% pay cut. Staff were moved to four days.
The biggest lesson learnt through that period? Said Sun, “Customers first, partners second, Trip.com third.”
By the second quarter of 2020 it had narrowed its loss to RMB200 million (almost breakeven), by the third quarter it turned profitable at an operating gain of RMB1.6 million, and by fourth quarter increased that to RMB500 million. “Speed of reaction to make sure our cost structure is flexible” was critical to recovery, said Sun.
As for the changes it’s seen in the market Sun said customers were paying more attention to safety measures, and it had encouraged partners to join its “safety network” by providing its customers with masks, hand sanitisers and thermometers so that they feel safe.
“The second trend is people prefer smaller groups, customised or private tours and travelling with close family and good friends.” And customers prefer to travel with suppliers with “flexible, cancellable and refundable” policies.
By the end of 2020 its content channels were generating more than double the traffic and tripling the time spent by customers on the site.
Said Sun, “We only started our content team last year and again it was our customer first philosophy that propelled our content strategy. What we found was customers were looking for information on other sites and then coming to us to make the booking.
“So we thought we should have the content ready on our site, and since we already have the products, it made the booking much easier. The results were very positive, people were booking and writing reviews, and that was contributing to the next customer’s search results. It was a positive end-to-end cycle.”
Live streaming also generated healthy customer awareness and traffic, and while it’s focusing on China Sun said it would be testing in Hong Kong and Macau.
Product development and innovation was also dialed up. It now has more than 100 product categories covering a range of services from rail, bus, car, diving, team building, mountain climbing – “anything our young customers want”.
This product range has helped it be competitive in lower tier cities. While the lead-in products in these cities are transport-led – rail, bus, flight – customers from these places also have access to local product offerings from tour guides to drivers. “If you drive traffic to the low end, you must also have product at the low end so it’s an end to end cycle,” she said.
When asked how it was competing with “invisible” brands such as Meituan (hotels), Didi (which just announced getting into corporate travel) and Pinduodo, Sun said, “We focus our team and we make sure we do one thing indepth, very well. We are the superapp for comprehensive, quality products for travel – from customer acquisition, product, tech offering and customer service. That’s our gene.”
Now the big question is, now that domestic travel has fully recovered, when will outbound travel restart from China? In January and February, the group saw tremendous increases in flight and hotel bookings and Sun is confident that it will have a robust year in domestic business, but says lots of questions remain over cross-border travel protocols.
“The medical experts need to form consensus – if a customer has been vaccinated, when they return to the country do they need to be quarantined or will the quarantine be shortened? If they can form a consensus, that would be helpful.
“Then countries need to publish their policies, post-vaccination, based on medical advice and companies like ours need to make sure this information is reflected in our offerings.”
She expressed optimism with the news she was hearing out of the US that by June or July, if you have been vaccinated, certain states will not requite quarantine. “We are very excited and that’s a positive move. As more and more people take the vaccine, we will see more recovery around the world.”
She concluded, “There is light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s work together and put concerted effort into the recovery.”
• Featured image credit (travellers at Jinbi Square’s Golden Horse and Jade Rooster Archways in Kunming, Yunnan): Panuwat Dangsungnoen/ GettyImages