One of the China's biggest ecommerce businesses will run its various travel and leisure interests under a single brand and platform to be known as Meituan Travel.
Meituan Travel covers all the travel businesses which operated as part of Meituan-Dianping (MTDP), which formed in 2015 when group buying platform Meituan merged with reviews platform Dianping in a deal valuing the combined business at a reported $15 billion.
In Jan16 the combined business raised $3.3 billion in a Series B round.
The statement about the launch of Meituan Travel talks in terms of "cementing its market leading position"
MTDP has a wide and varied range of products and services on offer and has 240 million active buying consumers. For the travel brand these users are a captive market.
Liang Chen, president of the travel and leisure business group, said:
"With Meituan Travel, we are going to be able to gradually direct our hundreds of millions of consumers to this new segment by providing them with a convenient, efficient, high-quality service encompassing every aspect of a successful travel experience."
The business however, is doing pretty well as it is, even before the concerted efforts to cross-sell travel to 240 million engaged users begins. Meituan Travel will comprise four business units, each of which is delivering some impressive volumes.
It already claims to be the leading online accommodation booking service provider in China, has relationships with 340,000 hotels in China and 200,000 overseas hotels. In April it sold more than 17 million room nights.
Earlier this year it launched Hazelnut B&B, an accommodation booking app which it hopes will have 150,000 bookable properties by the end of the year. The branding is confusing - Hazelnut is not a bed and breakfast in the Western sense but a peer-to-peer accommodation service which MTDP said would "become an important competitor to Airbnb in China".
Elsewhere Meituan Travel will have a domestic travel unit based around its existing excursions and attraction business which sold 67 million sightseeing tickets in 2016 and has access to more than 20,000 attractions. Its outbound travel interests are served by a travel guide app which covers 215 countries.
And last but not least is the transportation unit, selling airfares, rail tickets, boats and travel insurance.
The line about directing even more of MTDP's 240 million customers to the travel brand is given some context by a line in the statement talking about bundled offers. It said that 32% of hotel bookings also take advantage of MTDP's dining and catering options, namely its restaurant booking and food delivery businesses. And 17% of the hotel bookings also include a sightseeing ticket.
The scale of the domestic travel and leisure opportunity in China is vast. The oft-quoted "100 million outbound Chinese travellers" is significant on a global scale, but that number is eclipsed by the volume of travel within China. Ctrip may be spreading its wings internationally, but on its home turf it has some serious competition.
Related reading from Tnooz:China mega-merger brings O2O to the top table, travel and leisure on the menu (Oct2015)
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