One of China's largest online travel services providers, Trip.com Group Limited, has signed a new strategic cooperative partnership agreement with one of the country's largest e-commerce firms, JD.com. The partnership is aimed at expanding Trip.com's customer reach by utilizing JD.com's massive platform.
Under the agreement, the two companies have set five "visions of cooperation" that include targets such as expanding their respective user bases, resource sharing, combining sales channels, collaborating in offline and online scenarios, and cross-industry marketing. Through their partnership, the two companies will leverage their respective strengths to elevate each others' operations in what they called a "win-win situation."
Trip.com will be giving JD.com access to exclusive real-time tourism products, which it can sell on its platform. This will allow JD.com to offer tourism products that are competitively priced, which is expected to attract more users to its platform. In return, Trip.com will be getting access to JD.com's massive user base and vice versa. JD.com announced that it should be making the tourism products available on its platform within the next eight months.
Each company has access to more than 400 million active users each. By integrating their sales channels and resources, both companies can significantly expand their customer reach. Trip.com Group's chief marketing officer, Sun Bo, mentioned in a statement that the collaborative agreement will expand both parties' tourism-related businesses. Both companies have agreed to work together to develop more diversified products and services that will soon be offered to their combined 800 million users worldwide.
Just like other travel-related companies, Trip.com's business was greatly impacted by the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. During the first half of the year, tens of millions of trips booked on the company's website were canceled or rescheduled. The canceled trips, which were worth more than $4.46 billion, hindered the company's ability to generate any profits for the past quarters.
In recent weeks, China's domestic tourism has started to rebound. To take advantage of the recovery, Trip.com stated that it will be opening a flagship store on JD.com's platform. The travel services firm, which owns Skyscanner, Ctrip, and Qunar, also plans to launch live streaming programs to attract more bookings and sales. JD.com also mentioned that it plans to make additional investments to further enhance its platform's short-video live streaming e-commerce features.
