Culture Trip is finally bringing its long-awaited online travel agency out of hiding.
The initial release features 10 hotels per city across 12 cities and will expand to 40 cities in the next few months.
The company claims it has been looking at how it will cover destinations generally and wants to ensure it is taking the full purchase funnel into account.
Andy Washington, who was recruited from Expedia U.K. last year to set up the OTA, says the company has spent a lot of time understanding customer needs and is not just “replicating a bog standard OTA.”
He adds that Culture Trip wants to help customers find all the elements they would traditionally have had to trawl the internet for.
“Everything is about the customer journey and understanding for the next stage of that funnel," he says.
New hotel pages have been put together as part of the service with insight drawn from Culture Trip’s own teams, hotel experts and an external network of 300 people.
The expectation is for the OTA to ramp up quickly with 10,000 properties available in the coming months. Flights will also be added at a later stage.
Washington says Expedia, already an affiliate partner, is the first for the company in terms of providing a feed but that Culture Trip will be the principal (legally responsible entity) in the transaction.
Codegen is the technical partner in the background.
“The consumer UEX is us, we’re the principal. Customer service, a small team to start, are all being trained up at the moment.”
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There are no plans for a huge marketing splash to coincide with the launch, with Culture Trip continuing promotion through its existing marketing channels such as Snapchat.
Washington says: “With 18 million people coming to the site monthly, I don’t think we need to spend a lot of money to tell people are engaged and have high intent.”
Culture Trip is betting on the OTA as its big commercial play.
The company raised $80 million in funding in April 2018 for senior hires as well as the development of the OTA.