What are the pain points and development directions of tourism B2B?

In the past two years, tourism B2B platforms such as tourism circle, octopus and spider travel network have successively obtained financing of more than 100 million yuan, and the news that Xinlutong10.95 billion yuan was acquired by Tenbon International came one after another. The raging fire in China's tourism market is getting stronger and stronger, and the rapid rise of B2B platform has poured barrel oil on the online travel industry.

Judging from the overall situation of the tourism industry, the scale of China's tourism market is expected to exceed 4 billion person-times in 20 15. Tourism has become a rigid demand and an important part of improving people's livelihood. The contribution rate of tourism to employment will exceed 9%. In the next five years, tourism in China will help120,000 people get rid of poverty. In 20 14, the total tourism revenue of China was 3.3 trillion yuan, and the online tourism penetration rate was 8.5%. It is predicted that by 20 16, the penetration rate of online travel will exceed 10%, but the average annual growth rate will be less than 1%, far below the average growth rate of netizens in China.

It can be seen that the tourism industry will maintain steady growth in the future, and the emerging new models will also be the focus of investment. As a B2B platform in the tourism industry, it is of great help to open up all links in the industrial chain and speed up the efficiency of resource integration.

Tourism is a typical industry with abundant cash flow, low gross profit and scattered resources. With the reduction of public funds going abroad and the improvement of Chinese people's enthusiasm for tourism, the demand for tourism products is gradually changing to personalization and fragmentation, and the SKUs of destination products are numerous and scattered, which requires the transaction integration of B2B platform. In the tourism industry, the profit distribution of each link is roughly shown in the following figure. For the B2B platform, no matter which market segment it cuts into, its fundamental purpose is to improve the service efficiency at both ends through online transactions, reduce the original labor and marketing costs through Internet transformation, and shorten the industrial chain, so as to realize a new profit distribution system and become an efficiency amplifier for the operation of tourism economy.

At present, there are three main modes of tourism B2B platform.

The first is the channel operation mode, such as knowing people by traveling, gathering suppliers and distributors through franchise stores to form a distribution system, but this mode is not open and neutral enough and only participates in transaction settlement.

The second is the self-built model of suppliers or alliances, such as Chiyu Travel. By attracting the original dealers to query and place orders on the system, this model is also a self-hypnosis of putting offline business online to form a B2B platform. Participation and regionality are the bottlenecks that limit its development.

The third is the open platform model, such as tourism circle and new travel service. This inter-bank trading platform has formed a closed-loop trading and tourism ecosystem through integration, which is one of the trends of online travel in the future. From the perspective of B2B2C, it can be divided into two types: B2B expanding to the C end and B2C expanding to the B end.

For the existing tourism B2B platform, the system ability to match or form a certain degree of closed-loop transactions is far from the efficiency requirements required by the real B2B platform. Also, due to the huge offline store system, real-time inventory and corresponding speed can't keep up with the distribution rhythm of tourism products, which may be the biggest problem now.

Of course, we also see that a version 2.0 of GDS (Global Distribution System), a tourism distribution system similar to the "Happy Escape" project, has appeared in the market, which uses the 2.0 distribution system to complete the rapid integration of fragmented overseas tourism products and reduce the cost of personnel on duty.

In addition, the online travel platform is bound to be squeezed by the traditional travel platform, and there are some difficulties in product resources, customer acquisition channels, information asymmetry and other issues. In the future, the industry resources will be more concentrated, and the reduction of small and medium-sized travel agencies will also have a certain impact on tourism B2B.

Looking at the tourism market, the future industry integration is an inevitable trend. Whether it is the horizontal business scope expansion from transportation and accommodation to catering and entertainment products, the vertical industrial chain expansion from destination tourism product suppliers to customers, or even the domestic and global tourism products expansion, B2B platform still has a very large market space in the links worthy of tourism industry integration.

Fangchuang Research Institute believes that for the current B2B tourism platforms, there are some platforms with a certain scale, such as Tourism Circle, Octopus, Xinlutong, etc., but this does not mean that there is no chance for new models and platforms to rise. The core of evaluating B2B tourism projects is the team, and the second one can be measured from three dimensions: information technology, resource control and fund realization.

For example, can information technology replace manual duty with more powerful solutions to ensure the information integration of many products in global tourist destinations, rather than simply being an e-commerce platform;

Whether the enterprise has accumulated in the tourism industry for many years in terms of resources, whether it can strictly control the quality of tourism products and services, and whether the upstream and downstream channels are stable and convergent;

In terms of realizing funds, it is a difficult problem for most B2B platforms. Faced with the impact of O2O burning money, the problem of burning money and swiping bills on tourism B2B platforms is also widespread. For the tourism industry, it is more important to really open up the supply chain and make the platform service lighter and lighter.

If there is strong competitiveness, the tourism B2B market is still huge, and there is still room for substitution. As for whether we can wipe the oil and water in this fat meat that everyone is eyeing, it depends on the Eight Immortals crossing the sea to show their magical powers.