A Beginner's Guide to Tourism

Since entering the tourism field, I have never seen a relatively comprehensive and basic introduction to the industry, as well as concepts or overview content. Since there are many vertical media in the field of tourism, there are still a lot of high-level talks about the industry. If you are a beginner, your ability to read and understand this information will not be able to keep up, and a lot of the content will be inaccessible. I understand, I can only study it slowly.

Many of our new colleagues need to spend a lot of time doing research when they join the company. From the perspective of the overall chain, they also need to study tourism companies in market segments to clearly understand Their business model, and operating model.

At the same time, during the training of new colleagues, an overview of the overall industry will be given. I have always hoped to have time to compile a piece of information for reference by those who are new to the industry. From here, I can begin to have a general understanding of the rising industry of tourism and delve deeper into this field.

Over the years, I have been thinking about a question, which is how to lower the reading threshold for industry knowledge; relatively speaking, vertical media has depth, but the reading threshold is relatively high, especially with technology. Related content, for example, many people in the industry do not know what GDS is.

Different people may have different understandings of the tourism industry and have different perspectives; therefore, what I say is just my opinion and is for reference only. Internally, we often divide the tourism industry chain as follows:

Upstream resource suppliers include airlines, hotels, scenic spots, car rentals, cruises, etc.; the end is consumers; resource suppliers It can directly connect with consumers, but there are still some distributors in the middle, including offline travel agencies and online OTAs. Of course, there are also some business travel companies that are also involved.

In the aviation field, there is another important player between OTAs and airlines, which is GDS. Looking at the tourism industry chain compiled by companies such as iResearch and Analysys, GDS is not included. ; however, in the air ticket distribution market, GDS has played a very important role over the years and is also a very profitable company. They are players with truly abundant cash flow.

In the hotel field, between OTAs and hotels, there are also PMS manufacturers, hotel wholesalers, etc., forming this series of chains; in the tourism and vacation field, the overall chain is longer and more complex .

Often, the first stop for travelers is air tickets, or train tickets (high-speed rail tickets). Online booking of air tickets is now very mature, and air tickets are also considered a standardized product. For OTAs, it is also Huge traffic entrance. The traffic brought by train ticket bookings is now increasing.

The second stop is the hotel, and then there are the products of the tourist destination; among tourism products, air tickets and hotels have been very standardized, so in the competition of OTAs, the price war between air tickets and hotels is also fierce. The most intense.

Let’s start with the air ticket field

The upstream suppliers in the air ticket field are airlines, and airlines are divided into full-service airlines and low-cost airlines. Essentially, both airlines and railways provide point-to-point services, transporting passengers from point A to point B, but the transportation methods of airlines and railways are different.

The four major domestic airlines are Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Hainan Airlines, and the strongest among low-cost airlines is Spring Airlines. The core businesses of airlines include passenger transportation and cargo transportation. In the field of tourism, everyone is concerned about passenger transportation. Therefore, we will only talk about passenger transport business here.

The core of an airline’s passenger business is selling seats, that is, selling tickets; of course, in addition to selling seats, airlines now also sell some additional services. When airlines want to sell air tickets, they have two ways, namely direct sales and distribution; direct sales and distribution of air tickets are also hotly discussed topics in the aviation field.

Direct air ticket sales

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