What is the profit model of app bread travel and poor travel list before travel?

For startups in this field, accumulating users may be the most important thing, but how to establish a mature profit model is a problem that enterprises in the field of mobile travel should pay attention to. At present, the profit model that mobile travel app can try in the future basically includes three aspects, namely, advertising, booking and user payment model. Below we will combine the five stages of the travel process to analyze the profit opportunities of the mobile travel app one by one.

Tourism advertising model

First of all, for the stage of tourism planning and experience sharing, advertising has become a mature model for realizing the traffic of tourism reviews and community websites. The third quarter financial report of Tripadvisor, the world's largest tourism community, shows that the paid advertising revenue of click-and-show accounts for 90% of its total revenue, and the paid subscription and other income of merchants account for about 10%. Its advertisers include OTA, destination scenic spots, hotels, airlines, restaurants and other tourism suppliers and distributors, which is enough to prove that the huge commercial value contained in the tourism media platform has been recognized by advertisers.

With the continuous innovation and penetration of mobile intelligent devices, it is an indisputable fact that they have more and more influence on the travel planning and research process. According to Google's data, in the first quarter of this year, 43% of smartphone users in China searched for travel-related information. Undoubtedly, the changes in travel planning and search behavior of users using mobile terminals have created more opportunities for entrepreneurs in the mobile field.

But objectively speaking, due to some defects in the form of mobile advertising, it also directly affects the conversion rate of mobile advertising and the return on investment of advertisers, such as relatively small screen and lack of advertising expression; Mobile advertising can't get people's lasting attention; Mobile advertising click fraud rate is too high; Location-based advertising makes people worry about their privacy and some technical limitations (for example, the current mobile browser does not support the use of Cookies to track advertising behavior) and so on. Kayak's third-quarter financial report shows that its website's RPM (revenue per thousand searches) is $305, a year-on-year increase of 2%; However, the revolutions per minute of its mobile channel is only $62, up 63% year-on-year, and mobile advertising revenue accounts for less than 5% of its revenue. Although these data reflect the improvement of the liquidity of mobile channels, they also indirectly reflect that the current mobile advertising marketing is still in a very primary stage.

Secondly, the price comparison model before travel booking has become a mature business model of PC-side travel search websites, but the complex search conditions and search results involved in the price comparison model are not suitable for mobile display, not to mention the depth of search technology and the accumulation of resources of advertisers and users of traditional travel search websites, which makes it more difficult for the latter to find breakthrough opportunities in this field.

Third, there may be a breakthrough in the advertising push mode based on the location of users when they travel. Travelers on the journey will have rigid needs such as catering, shopping and tickets, hotels, destination activities, ground transportation reservations, etc., and there should be considerable opportunities to intelligently push merchants and promotional information based on the user's location. Moreover, there are no giant companies in this field, which also leaves room for growth for startups. For example, GoogleNow, a virtual personal assistant developed by Google, can track the places and schedules that users often go to, thus providing users with relevant advertising information, such as pushing a breakfast sandwich to users on the way to work. In our interview, Chen Wei, the founder of Youdao, also said that it will eventually become a Youdao travel recommendation search engine, which will help users make travel behavior decisions through intelligent recommendation.

From the above analysis, it can be seen that it is unrealistic for entrepreneurs in the mobile field to create a considerable income scale only by mobile advertising in the short term. In some mobile apps evaluated by the author, some developers only developed mobile apps without corresponding PC apps. At the same time, some apps have built-in mobile advertisements for other life services. However, because tourism apps themselves are not high-frequency applications (even some apps developed for a single destination and scenic spot will be uninstalled by users after the tour), the above factors limit their content and traffic liquidity to some extent.

Travel booking mode

The traditional competition between air tickets and hotel reservations has been highly heated, and APP startups have basically no room for survival in this field. As mentioned above, the travel booking opportunities of mobile travel app will be more concentrated in the fields of catering, tickets, hotels, destination activities, ground transportation, etc., and there is considerable imagination space in combination with the advertising push and booking of LBS. The mobile travel APP startups interviewed this time generally accept the business model of booking travel products. However, due to the low electronic level of offline merchants and the immature mobile payment technology, it is difficult to see the rapid growth opportunities in this field in the short term. But the good news is that Google's data shows that about 40% of tablet users made online purchases in the past month, twice as many as smartphone users, which is an inspiration for startups in the mobile field. It may be a shortcut for tablet users to seek a breakthrough.

User pay

For most travel apps, the road of user payment seems to be difficult to get through in the short term. First, the consumption habits of domestic users have not been formed; Second, in the case that the functions and contents of most travel apps are very homogeneous, users seem to have no good reason to pay for a travel app.