Since Li Mu’s Gubei Water Town project and the film and television base project have cooperated with the State-owned Tourism Group, this time Li Mu wants to promote outbound tourism in the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Yangzhou and Shenzhen and California. The State-owned Tourism Group also attaches great importance to it. Not only did they fully participate in it, but they also arranged for three senior consultants to participate in the formulation of the plan before the summit forum.
The reason why the plan needs to be worked out before the forum starts is because Li Mu’s idea is to first make some rough plans for the summit forum, like customizing independent travel or group travel through travel APPs, and then bring these plans to the summit At the forum, both parties can choose one of them, or disrupt the elements and piece it together again.
If the two parties are completely allowed to talk freely, everyone's situation is different, and they lack sufficient understanding of each other, it may not be possible to come up with a truly feasible routine in three to five days.
Therefore, Li Mu feels that when talking to both parties A and B, you can neither talk about A's way nor B's way. You have to talk about your own way, and let both parties adapt to you. After all, he is the one who contributes money and effort to promote everything behind the scenes. 's dad.
If we want to promote cross-tourism between two groups with different cultures, different economic development status, and different consumption concepts, the first thing to do is to seek common ground while reserving differences.
What is the same thing? They all pursue cost-effectiveness, which includes lower prices, better services, and a better experience.
The price is easy to solve. Li Mulai does underwriting for airlines and hotel groups. Not to mention that he is prepared to subsidize some money in the early stage. Even if he doesn't subsidize a penny, he can still get a wholesale price for users, and the price advantage will naturally arise. ;
However, Li Mu is doing online business after all, but tourism is essentially an offline activity. No one can turn on a computer and let users "cloud travel", so in this part, offline companies must cooperate with him. , work together to serve the customers of both parties.
First of all, a complete customer service mechanism must be established for users who purchase independent travel services.
Whether Chinese people come to the United States or Americans come to China, no matter how strong their language skills are, they will definitely encounter some problems that are difficult to solve or do not know how to solve. At this time, if someone can provide them with native language services, it will be helpful to users The experience will be much better.
After 2010, American travel companies were very bad. They sold Asia free travel services to their own people, and then in order to save costs, they placed 24-hour telephone customer service in India. This is because India’s labor costs are very low, and India itself Having been colonized by the British for many years, English is very popular. Although these people speak English with a very obvious accent, the actual communication problem is not big.
It feels a lot like northerners listening to southerners speak Mandarin. Although the pronunciation may not be very standard, communication is not a big problem.
But this kind of thing is ridiculous when you think about it. An American traveled to China, encountered an emergency, and called customer service in India...
Li Mu feels that since the independent travel business is sold by Taobao, and the tourism resources sold by Taobao are integrated by Makino Technology from the market, it is necessary for him to be responsible to the users to the end. Therefore, he must open A 24-hour English service hotline and a 24-hour Chinese service hotline must be opened.
It is not necessary for him to put English service in India. He wants to put the customer service center in each language in the other country, that is, put the Chinese customer service center in the United States, and then put the English service center in China.
A big reason for doing this is that he feels that when a Chinese person goes to Los Angeles and encounters a problem that he doesn't understand, calling back to ask a customer service person working somewhere in China is no better than calling customer service staff. How reliable is it in India
It would be better to recruit Chinese people who speak Chinese and English fluently from California directly. He does not need to have a high degree of education, and his understanding of local conditions is enough. You can even directly put the customer service center in Chinatown, so that Chinese people can go to work right away;
As for domestic English-speaking customer service centers, it is not feasible to hire Americans who understand local conditions. After all, China is not a country of immigrants. However, it is not that difficult to hire Chinese people who speak good English.
A customer service center has been established to respond to various problems and emergencies that users may encounter at all times. In this way, the biggest obstacle to cross-border free travel, the language barrier, has been solved.
In addition, travel groups from both China and the United States must connect all their resources to customer service centers, which will make it more convenient to directly provide services to independent travel customers.
For example, a Chinese couple who arrived in Los Angeles temporarily decided to rent a car and hire a tour guide. Such a request could be directly informed to customer service, who would place an order with a local travel company in Los Angeles. They would immediately follow the order and respond after receiving the order. , not only served users, but also created benefits for them.
The best solution is actually to directly import all the resources of the tourism group into the Taobao platform, so that users can directly purchase according to their actual needs. However, the mobile Internet has not yet started and there is no mobile support. The effect of such a platform is It will be greatly reduced.
The consultants of travel companies all agree with this model. In the past, it was difficult for them to make money from independent travel users. However, once a platform connects them with independent travel users, they will have the opportunity to sell themselves to independent travel users. services.
As for group travel, this is actually the main source of income for travel companies and is also the first choice for most travel users.
Combined with the scandals he heard about so many tour groups in his previous life, Li Mu put forward his own requirements in this solution:
"In the future, group tour products sold through Taobao must accept Taobao's service supervision, and credit scores will be given to travel companies that undertake group tours. Once the number of customer complaints exceeds the regulations, the travel company will be immediately punished or even removed from the shelves. .”
Senior consultants of the state-owned tourism group expressed their opinions one after another, saying: "Mr. Li, this requirement is too harsh for the tourism group. The tourism group itself is the actual undertaker of services in this cooperation. The online platform built by your company is closely related to the tourism group. It should be a cooperative relationship of a sales agency nature. As long as there is a disclaimer clause on your company's platform, any problems that arise between us and users during the service process in the future will be resolved privately by us."
Li Mu waved his hand and said: "That won't work. I want to do this business, not because I want to help you sell services and earn the difference, but because I want to turn high-quality outbound travel into a business card. So between us The cooperation model here is that I provide you with users, you are responsible for me, and I am responsible for the users. If the users have any dissatisfaction, they can directly hold me accountable. If I determine that it is your problem, then I will replace the users. Hold you accountable.”
The other party originally just wanted to gain more benefits and initiative for himself, but he didn't expect Li Mu to be so tough on this matter, so one of them said to Li Mu: "Mr. Li, as consultants, we are here to help you find problems and solve them." It’s a problem, so in this business, I really think you should maximize your profits and minimize your responsibilities.”
At this point, the other party explained in detail: "You see, tour group itself is a very complex industry, and there are many open pits and hidden ditches. The birth of a tour group product is actually no different from the birth of an insurance product. , it is necessary to calculate every link and repeatedly check the actual cost of the product, such as air tickets, hotels, food and accommodation, ticket labor and transportation fees, and risk costs, and then calculate the gray income hidden in the product. In this way, customers will complain. It will be difficult to reduce the problem to a very low level. The best option for you is to determine a commission ratio with us, and then hang out the exemption clause, so that you can get out of the relationship."
Li Mu said: "You must understand that today is a traffic-based society, and the core of all industries will gradually converge to the traffic center. In other words, whoever has the traffic in their hands is Party A."
After saying that, Li Mu paused and said: "In our cooperation, I am the one with the traffic, and I am the Party A."
"If you are a flour mill, according to the business model of the planned economy decades ago, you are indeed Party A, and all sellers are asking to sell your goods. But now times have changed, and now there are companies like Wal-Mart. Giants, on the retail side, they control the center of traffic. If you want to sell goods with them, you have to look at their faces. If they say they deposit your money, they can deposit your money; if they say they let you give them consumption If you want to give profits to consumers, you must obediently give profits to their consumers.”
"What I want to do is to be a Wal-Mart in the field of travel and travel. I am not selling products for you. I am purchasing products from you and selling them to my users. For me, users are the most important. As for whose flour I sell, it doesn’t actually matter, as long as I have flour here, that’s enough.”
Li Mu made it very clear, but it is still difficult for today's tourism groups to understand the future business model, but it doesn't matter. Since they are now leading a new way of playing, these companies must naturally follow their own rules of the game.
In later generations, more and more young people choose to buy group tours on online platforms, not only because it is more convenient to purchase online, but also because it is easier to protect rights on online platforms. The services purchased from Ctrip, regardless of whether they are self-operated by Ctrip, will If something goes wrong, you can go to Ctrip for rights protection. Although Ctrip's rights protection may not be the best, it will definitely be much better than a certain travel company or travel agency.
So this is why the customer base of offline travel agencies is getting narrower and narrower. People who really understand tourism and have the ability to spend travel spend their travel funds online. These offline travel agencies can only fool middle-aged and elderly people everywhere, and do a lot of things. To engage in low-price shopping groups, this kind of shopping group travel agencies have to work hard to hide dirt if they want to make money. In the end, they fall into a vicious cycle that gets worse and worse, making themselves notorious...
(End of chapter)