Meituan stirs up trouble, Hello takes over, and Dripping changes its face, as the travel market sets off a new traffic war

About the way of cooperation, there is a saying that the drop for the third-party travel service providers to provide traffic entrance, the third-party travel service providers for the drop to provide capacity, the drop from the third party to extract commissions, but based on the third-party travel to provide capacity, the drop extracted commission varies, the minimum extraction of 10% commission per single.

For the adjustment of the model, the drop side explained that because of the peak period of more orders, users face the problem of difficult to get a taxi, access to the third-party capacity, can alleviate such problems and improve the user experience.

In the battle for the online car map in the past few years, DDT had killed its way out of the pack, and was recognized as the leader of China's online car market after acquiring Express Taxi and Uber China one after another, and had no competitors with the same ability for a long time.

However, in the past a long time, the drop put more energy on the safety level, such as investing huge amounts of money and technical resources to build a more complete science and technology security system, safety instead of business growth has become the primary goal. The slowdown of the industry giants has also "created" new opportunities for competitors.

In fact, the adjustment of the business model of DDT has revealed a new signal of change in the industry, that is, the old traffic and growth is being challenged from the policy and regulatory level, including DDT and other major platforms need to find a new pool of traffic, the aggregation of platforms has become one of the best ways.

DDT seeks change

Early in the morning of June 13, an illegal network car broke and escaped at the intersection of Zhenning Road on Yan'an West Road in Shanghai's Jing'an District, causing four people to be injured in the process, one of whom was in serious condition.

This incident became a new trigger. The next day, the Law Enforcement Headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission urgently interviewed DDT. At the interview, the Law Enforcement Headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission further put forward six requirements for compliance of the network car rental platform to DDT. This includes, before the end of June this year, a comprehensive self-inspection statistics combing platform without network reservation car rental qualification of registered vehicles and for the clearance.

In the past a long time, combined with the new policy of net car in each city of operation to complete the rectification is the net car company's work focus, such as obtaining the net car license plate, review the driver's vehicle qualifications, especially in Beijing, Shanghai, Beijing license plate, Shanghai license plate constraints make the major platforms like walking on thin ice.

Data previously made public by DDT shows that of the more than 410,000 drivers that have been activated in Shanghai, less than 10,000 have local Shanghai household registration. Although DDT has not disclosed the data in Beijing, but if based on our previous experience in the ride projections, to meet the Beijing nationality Beijing license special express car drivers are also very limited. The immediate impact on DDT after the purge is a lack of capacity.

Looking back at the important points in the development of net taxi, 2017 is a year worth being remembered. It was the year when the new policy on online taxi was implemented, but it was also just the starting point for changes to the overall market. After that, the efficiency of hailing rides, price changes, and the future direction of the overall market regarding online rides all came back into focus.

According to the "deep net" previously understood, at that time, the direct impact of the new policy on the drop is that, even in the case of still maintaining growth, the national performance of the express car set at the beginning of 2017 has not been completed in its entirety, and key cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have been greatly affected.

The regulatory problems have not yet been fully resolved, and the drip has had new troubles in the past year. It can be said that 2018 is a year in which DDT is looking for change: on the one hand, it is around the regulation and the new policy of online car rental to make drastic adjustments, although the new policy leaves a certain margin of reprieve from the landing to the real implementation, but the time left is really not much; on the other hand, affected by the incident of the tailwind car, the capacity supply capacity that DDT can provide has encountered a significant landslide.

DDT had disclosed that as of the end of 2017, DDT Shunfeng car registered owners 30 million people, 160 million registered passengers, with an average daily order of 2 million orders; a 2017 operational data also showed that DDT Shunfeng car and express carpooling services have accumulated more than 1.05 billion shared seats. Since the downstream car business, this part of the capacity has been directly weakened to zero.

Just during this time when DDT is focusing on safety overhaul, the entire travel industry has quietly undergone new changes.

In October last year, hello travel on-line taxi service, which means that from the past bicycle single business across to the competition in the four-wheeled travel market. Hello's ambition can be seen in the previous name change from "Hello Bike" to "Hello Travel". The new brand means that this bicycle company, which started as a bike-sharing service, has upgraded its products, services, technology and responsibility, and opened a new development stage from a bike-sharing service provider to a professional mobile travel platform.

Backed by Ali, the ambition of Hello Travel is obvious. After the online car business, in January this year, hello travel and officially launched the ride business, in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Hefei, Chengdu and other cities to open operations. Recently, it also took out 500 million to establish the "Shunfeng Green Travel Fund" to subsidize users.

From the reality of official data, as of mid-March, the number of registered owners of Hello ride has exceeded 2 million people, and the total number of orders issued has reached 7 million. In order to take advantage of the situation to consolidate the turf, hello travel on the eve of the May Day holiday to take out 500 million yuan for centralized subsidies.

No matter which way you look at it, Drip has to do something to counter the bending of its competitors.

The new competition for traffic

The new changes continue, since May this year, Meituan taxi began to continue to deepen the travel market through the aggregation model.

In the travel industry, the earliest on-line aggregation mode is Gaode Map.In 2017, Gaode Map launched the Easy Travel platform, and travel service providers such as Dripping Travel, Shenzhou Chauffeur, Shouqi Jiaoqi, Mobike, Flying Pig and other travel service providers were accessed as the first batch of partners into the platform.

At the time, Gaode Maps was often outsiders treated as a competitor of the Drops, but in fact, officials have repeatedly said that it is a cooperative relationship with various online car rental platforms. For AutoNavi, the EasyTravel platform marks an important step in upgrading its transportation strategy.

"Gaode will build a public travel service platform with cloud + end capabilities based on the Easy Travel Platform and Traffic Brain to promote the connection, synergy and evolution of the three elements of people, vehicles and roads." Gaode has said so.

In addition to the aggregation mode by the outside world to give high attention, is the drop in the travel market face "halfway killer" Meituan taxi. After several months of silence, Meituan taxi this year completely abandoned to continue to do self-management, changed to the aggregation model.

The first cities to go live with the aggregation model were Shanghai and Nanjing, which were also the first cities to go live with Meituan Taxi, followed by the gradual addition of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Ningbo, Tianjin, Chongqing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Changsha, Hefei, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Accessed services include mainstream travel service providers such as Shouqi Jiaozi, Cao Cao Travel, and Shenzhou Chauffeur.

Meituan had invested heavily in the taxi business, of course, high subsidies caused by the loss of the same is also an important reason for Meituan stopped to continue to self-operated - has been listed Meituan had to consider how to get a better look at the financial data.

The Meituan prospectus showed that the launch of the pilot online taxi service in 2017 led to an increase in the cost of online taxi drivers from nil in 2016 to RMB293.0 million in 2017. It increased from RMB 5.8 million for the year ended April 30, 2017 to RMB 975.9 million for the same period in 2018.

Meituan's attitude towards the taxi business from "will not give up taxi" to "will not increase the investment in the network car", the aggregation model seems to be a compromise, especially in the current regulatory tightening of the background.

The attitude of Meituan towards the investment in the travel business can also be seen from the adjustment of the business structure.In December 2017, after the completion of a new round of financing of $4 billion, the travel division was divided into a separate division; and by October 2018, after the listing of Meituan, the division was integrated with the large transportation and unmanned delivery divisions into the LBS platform.

Whether it's Gaode Map or Meituan Taxi, the huge traffic and data it can get is undoubtedly what it's aiming at by making a traveling aggregation platform.