Meituan-Dianping, China’s largest service-focused e-commerce platform, has launched Meituan Travel, a new travel and leisure platform consolidating the company’s offerings across accommodation, domestic travel, outbound travel and transportation units.
A highlight of the newly unified platform is the company’s ability to cross sell multi-category products and services. Among all customers booking hotel rooms on the platform, 32 per cent also place dining or catering orders and 17 per cent tickets for activities.
According to a Meituan statement, the platform is already China’s leading online accommodation booking service provider in terms of room nights sold, recording more than 17 million room nights in April 2017.
Meituan Travel partners more than 340,000 hotels in China and 200,000 overseas. It also introduced a Hazelnut B&B application recently, with 150,000 accommodation listings expected in 2017.
It also touts having the largest online domestic attraction and excursion package ticketing platform offering 400 cities and 20,000 packages, with 67 million domestic sightseeing attraction tickets sold in 2016.
For outbound travel, a Meituan-Dianping application and travel guide covers 215 countries and regions. According to the company, it is among the top three most-used apps by Chinese tourists when travelling abroad, next to WeChat and Google Maps.
As of April, 2017, Meituan-Dianping is posting three digit year-on-year increases in revenue and is operating profitably.
