Hello Hotel has taken shape, but industry difficulties still need to be solved urgently

As one of the few surviving platforms in the bicycle-sharing industry, Hello Travel has previously announced that it will give up listing in the United States, but its business expansion has long made it no longer limited to Enjoy a bicycle in ***. The expansion of travel services such as electric bicycles, ride-hailing, and electric vehicles has also made it become a comprehensive platform.

And Haro Travel CEO Li Kaizhu has previously said, "Hallo does not position itself as a company that only does travel. We hope to develop into a comprehensive super inclusive life platform. , so Haro has developed two-wheel, battery swap, ride-hailing, taxi-hailing, local life and other businesses, which will be Haro’s important goal in the next few years.”

Further expanding business boundaries, Hello Hotel connects travel and local life services

Since the completion of Series A financing in 2016, Hello Travel has completed 10 rounds of financing in 5 years , in fact, as early as 2018, it had already shown its intentions in business expansion after changing its name to Hello Travel. After successively launching ride-hailing, motorcycles, electric vehicle sales, battery replacement and other businesses, and beginning to get involved in local life services and other fields, the hotel has undoubtedly become another attempt by Hello Travel to break through the business boundaries.

With the increasing expansion of business scope, Hello Travel is obviously no longer a simple travel platform. It is constantly exploring the upstream and downstream of the travel industry chain, and has also deployed travel-related hotel business. , and it is more like its intention to complement the travel ecology. Its previously published prospectus has shown that the two-wheel sharing business and ride-hailing have become the main source of revenue.

Following the launch of Hello's daily life consumption portal in April 2020, providing in-store catering, finance, maps, tourism and other services, it seems that the prototype of its local life services has been formed. For Hello Travel, which wants to be a "super inclusive life platform", launching the hotel business on this basis is not only a complement to the next step in the travel business, but also obviously a part of the local life service business. kind of supplement.

However, in the view of many industry insiders, with Hello Travel currently building a platform ecosystem to meet the needs of more users, whether it is based on Internet travel services or moving towards local life services, the hotel At this stage, all businesses will be faced with the prospect of powerful enemies.

Entering the hotel segment, Hello Hotel may still have opportunities

Judging from the current official business form, Hello Hotel has adopted a light franchise similar to OYO The model is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized independent hotels. In addition to changing the brand name to "Hello Hotel", Hello Hotel will use traffic empowerment, operation empowerment, and revenue management optimization as the entry point to reduce costs and increase revenue for individual hotels. After the hotel joins, Hello will provide one-to-one professional guidance to help the hotel optimize its front-end display from OTA platform optimization, channel development, etc., and adjust its operating strategy in a timely manner based on changes in business district traffic data.

According to relevant official data, after receiving professional guidance from the operation team, individual customer orders for a franchise store in Sichuan increased by 37% after 23 days compared with before the adjustment, OTA clicks increased by 35%, and OTA services Quality scores increased by an average of 17%. Therefore, it is not difficult to see that Hello is actually trying to incorporate individual hotels into this system and form them into a chain hotel group.

This franchise model is actually a relatively lower-cost way for Hello Travel to enter the hotel industry for the first time. After all, compared with the huge investment in building a self-built hotel, it is There are also greater risks when there is no profit yet. At this stage, independent hotels are an extremely fragmented and relatively blue ocean market. According to the "China Hotel Industry Report", there are approximately 920,000 independent hotels in the domestic hotel stock market, accounting for more than 85%, and the reachable market size is close to 1 trillion. Although OYO's previous development in the domestic market was not satisfactory, Haro clearly sees this market with huge potential.

But OYO has officially tried in this field, which undoubtedly gave Hello Hotel valuable experience. Yang Lei, CEO of Haro Travel, previously revealed that "most of Haro's users are ordinary people in the sinking market. Based on this user base, Haro hopes to be a mid-to-low-end hotel." In the absence of unified standards for service standards and operations, this type of hotel will obviously bring greater room for development.

Although in the market today, OTA platforms that have obtained resources from high-star hotels and mature hotel chains have built a relatively deep moat in terms of business and user habits. However, from the perspective of Meituan, which has not been in this field for a long time, its first quarter financial report showed that its in-store, hotel and tourism business revenue reached 6.584 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 112.7%. From this, it is not difficult to find that under the traditional OTA platform, there is still a promising market space.

Regardless of hotels or OTAs, Hello still needs further exploration at this stage

For Hello, which now has 400 million users, it has already demonstrated the potential of a traffic platform. Advantages, in order to divert users from new hotel business, it may also be just a way of monetization. But now in the field of hotel chains, according to the "2019 China Hotel Chain Development and Investment Report" released by Yingdie Consulting, as early as 2019 among the top 10 hotel chain brands in China, there were 553 All Seasons hotels with the smallest number of stores, and 7 Sky Hotel has the largest number of stores, reaching 2,283, and Home Inn has 233,226 guest rooms. Therefore, this also means that Hello Hotel still has a long way to go if it wants to make a rapid breakthrough in this field.

In fact, independent hotels also face many unresolved pain points, and due to problems such as popularity, such hotels are also easily "kidnapped" by OTAs. It was previously reported that OYO had paid channel fees of 200 million yuan and 400 million yuan to Ctrip and Meituan respectively. At the same time, certain commissions were required to complete transactions on the corresponding platforms. But in comparison, Hello Travel itself is a traffic channel, but at this stage user habits still need some time to cultivate.

So for Hello Travel at this stage, when the hotel business has just started, how to complete the cold start, import the platform's traffic into this business, and cultivate users' usage habits may be an urgent problem. Problems to be solved. As for whether this business line can expand the travel business and complete its layout in local life services, it will take time to give the answer.