Tonight, the hotel has a special sale on space time.

As people who often stay in hotels know, the reserved hotels will generally be kept until 6 pm, and if they don't check in after 6 pm, the reservation will be considered invalid. This means that after this period of time, the hotel will generate a certain amount of surplus "inventory". Ren Xin and his team saw this business opportunity and decided to develop the hotel special application tonight and build a Weifang sales platform. For this new model, Ren Xin positioned it as the outlet of the hotel industry.

Ren Xin said that every night at 6 o'clock, the hotel will check the number of vacant rooms, and at the same time subtract the demand for arriving at the store after 6 o'clock, and then you can put the remaining inventory on the "Hotel Special Tonight" platform, which is generally sold at a price of 20% to 30%. For example, a four-star hotel usually costs 599 yuan. If there are too many vacant rooms at night, it will provide a certain number of rooms at the price of 200 yuan/room for the "special hotel price tonight".

In the whole sales process, "Tonight's Hotel Specials" and outlets take exactly the same route: on the one hand, they attract customers who pay attention to cost performance through ultra-low discount prices, thus selling the hotel's inventory; On the other hand, users are differentiated by increasing restrictions on channels (only through smartphone APP booking), time (only after 6 pm) and goods (most hotels can only book one night), thus ensuring the normal sales of hotels.

Through this combination of "limiting channels and goods", it not only protects the normal sales of upstream merchants, but also maximizes its own interests.

Temper offline integration ability

Ren Xin, CEO of "Tonight Hotel Special" Deng He, was a person in the electric business circle in his early years. They realized the importance of hotel industry resources at the beginning of their business. Therefore, they chose to cooperate with Huitong World, an open hotel booking agent.

Ren Xin said frankly: the profit model of "Tonight's Hotel Special" is distribution, that is, negotiate a specific price with the hotel, then get the agreed price from the cooperative hotel at a price 50% or even lower than the general hotel online booking price, and then sell the room online at your own price to earn the difference. After the customer directly pays the "special hotel price tonight", he will settle the "special hotel price tonight" with the hotel. From the perspective of cash flow, mobile phone payment cash flow is in its own hands, there is no pressure on the account period, and the operating cost is relatively low.

"At first, mobile payment was very difficult, which greatly damaged the user experience. After several months of trial and error, we have now begun to allow users to pay at the hotel front desk. " Ren Xin told the reporter of China Business News.

For an entrepreneurial enterprise, its own resources are limited after all. Weibo's high-profile communication made Ctrip quickly notice the hotel specials in the initial stage tonight. Soon, Ctrip responded quickly and launched a similar product. Qunar.com also quickly launched a similar hotel product "night sale".

For the strong entry of giants, Ren Xin said that more and more similar products will only make the market bigger. In addition, although online to offline is a "light" mode, startups should not only be an online platform limited to media functions, but also set up their own sales team to master offline resources, thus forming their own core competitiveness. To this end, Ren Xin said that the "Hotel Special Tonight" is setting up a sales team in Beijing non-stop. He has realized that in the era of mobile internet, the level of offline integration ability is the key to the success or failure of the company.