Established metasearch brands including Kayak and Skyscanner are set to foray into China. It will be interesting to watch the development as these companies enter with contrasting market-entry strategies.
Travel metasearch continues to spread its tentacles as established players look beyond the US and Europe for expansion.
NB: This article is written by Ritesh Gupta, reporter at TravelDaily China.
This trend is paving way for intriguing battles in several markets. China is a prime example of this phenomenon.
With Kayak targeting China with a local site, and Skyscanner opting to acquire Chinese metasearch specialist Youbibi, the stage is set for intense competition.
One can’t refrain from evaluating about how these brands are going to take on nine-year old metasearch brand Qunar.
As one digs deeper, it becomes clear that these brands first need to sort out key issues like product sourcing to make sure that a solid local metasearch product is ready.
VP of Kayak Asia Pacific, Debby Soo, says:
Major challenges, Qunar's progress so far
A newcomer is expected to face numerous challenges. The most critical aspect of any metasearch business is the depth of its content, and this is precisely where complexity is deeply rooted in China. For instance, even the definition of a hotel isn’t clear.
Joseph Xiao, team manager - Greater China and Singapore Markets, HotelsCombined, says:
According to sources, a specialist like Qunar would cover around 150,000 lodging options, including hotels, B&Bs etc.
Other than in-house hotel sourcing team, other options for a metasearch include pulling data from OTAs. Companies can also work with with B2B partners like wholesalers and the likes of DerbySoft , but overall metasearch services need to avoid time-consuming, and expensive routes.
"The hybrid model of Qunar is different from what a traditional metasearch or traffic generation site would focus on," said a source based in Beijing.
Other than charging for CPC and cost per sale basis, and display ads, Qunar also offers hotel reservation promotional programs - last minute sale (featuring over 12,000 hotels) and opaque booking platform.
The source further added, "While metasearch services are generally OTA friendly, Qunar is competing with OTAs on the commission front. Qunar possesses a technology solution for around 60,000 hotels or so (signed directly by Qunar), where they market and sell their inventory and garner commission in return."
Qunar continues to invest in strengthening its product. In the first quarter of this year, the company’s product sourcing expenses were over $6.3 million, an increase of 358% year-on-year.
As for flights, Qunar’s search results featured over 3,550 domestic routes from 17 airlines by the end of last year. The figure represented all domestic flight routes in China.
Catching up with local players
The concept of - "facilitated bookings" - where a user doesn’t leave the metasearch site and still completes the booking with supplier/OTA has been prevalent for both flights and hotels here in China.
For any international metasearch brand that hasn’t focused on this aspect, it would call for major adjustment – in terms of both technology as well as regulatory licensing requirements, explained a source.
Kayak does offer facilitated booking in flights, hotels and cars so users can book their travel without leaving the site or app. Kayak might not face any major teething problems, but in all likelihood Skyscanner must have weighed this in while going for a strategic alliance with Youbibi.
Another key element would be gaining brand recognition. Last year, Qunar garnered over 60% of its traffic without incurring any payment for it. This denotes that visitors reached its site through organic search results - by entering the domain name in browser, or redirecting from Baidu pursuant to its business cooperation agreement and other related agreements with Baidu.
In all, Qunar processed around three billion web and mobile search queries for air tickets and hotels, respectively, last year. Mobile search queries have risen from 30 million in 2011 to over 780 million at the end of 2013.
Also, a key aspect is to go beyond just price comparison and aid decision-making with an apt blend of content and tools.
YuanYuan Zhang, former marketing head of TripAdvisor China, says, a company focused only on metasearch would not be able to satisfy the need of the Chinese users, especially in the hotel sector. She says one has to aptly feature users’ review and enhance the overall metasearch experience. In case of Qunar, the number of hotel reviews grew to 2.3 million by the end of the first quarter this year.
Zhang also says, "just having a localization team in place isn’t enough, the pace of setting up operations and constant improvisation counts, too".
This is where Kayak is expected to make rapid strides, counting on its technology prowess.
Soo from Kayak says:
Qunar – can’t afford to be complacent
Hotels based out of China acknowledge the role of Qunar in distribution.
VP of Bangkok-based Onyx Hospitality Group, Chetan Patel, says:
Onyx has chosen to only pursue the CPC model, and not gone ahead with the transaction model of Qunar.
Even for existing metasearch players there are certain challenges that are tough to handle.
"One of the biggest challenges we faced was the recent GFW (Great Firewall), which completely blocked all Google services in China recently, and slowed down the Internet access speed into and out of China," said an executive, associated with a metasearch engine outside China.
It is clear that Kayak, with established global presence, is expected to pose a challenge for the outbound segment. Also, a section of the industry believes that Qunar isn’t expanding aggressively outside China.
It is learnt that Qunar is planning to set up a team that is going to target Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand for hotel inventory. Also, tie-ups with Booking.com and Agoda isn’t ruled out, and the majority of Asian content is expected to come from tie-ups. This would be interesting, considering that the Priceline group is getting stronger than ever.
Similarly, OTAs in China are a major source for suppliers’ content, so whether there would be any alliance or commercial agreement with a metasearch engine would be an interesting development to watch.
Any perceived favoritism by any metasearch service could also mean jeopardizing meta revenue from the other OTAs.
NB: Senior executives from Kayak, Skyscanner and HotesCombined are scheduled to speak at the upcoming TravelDaily Conference scheduled for September 3-4, Shanghai.
NB2: This article is written by Ritesh Gupta, reporter at TravelDaily China. It appears here as part of Tnooz’s sponsored content initiative.
NB3:China image via Shutterstock.