How does Mutumei break through the Internet celebrity homestay market? In the face of fierce competition, how can it find a breakthrough in the “Three Kingdoms” pattern and build a unique brand positioning? This article will provide an in-depth analysis of Mutumi’s market strategy, explore its core competitiveness, and explore new opportunities in the future homestay industry.
When people talk about the dispute over homestay booking platforms, they often mention the importance of Internet celebrity homestays to the platform.
If you open the listing page of the homestay booking platform and observe their distribution patterns, you will find that Internet celebrity homestays have already occupied half of the top of the recommended list. However, in terms of subdivision, the recommendation logic of each company is different.
Nowadays, homestay booking platforms have tasted the sweetness brought by Internet celebrity homestays.
The mental occupation under the Internet celebrity homestay is becoming the new normal of competition for Mu Tumei.
The Three Kingdoms killed, each with its own moat
The three companies of Muniao Tujia and Meituan all took the same route, that is, to attract users with price, but in terms of segmentation, they are different.
The top two labels of Wooden Bird B&B are today’s preferred and flash booking. Today’s preferred is the price-to-price ratio of the selected listings selected by the platform, that is, the recommended listings that comprehensively comprehend the characteristics, room prices, and landlord services, while flash bookings represent the merchant’s ability to perform the contract to a certain extent (flash booking listings can be booked without the landlord’s second confirmation, reducing the waiting time of users). Judging from the listing page, the top listings are all labeled as Simu Selection and Internet celebrity homestays, with a maximum price of 220 yuan. The housing discount is more than 100 yuan, mostly for the platform activities in which the landlord participates and the landlord’s red envelopes.
Tujia B&B chose a price range of 350 yuan by default for users, and launched a zero coupon of 1-9 yuan. Judging from the listing page, most of them are strictly selected homestays. Strictly selected homestays in transit belong to medium homestays, that is, homestay listings with certain characteristics and relatively recognized by consumers, that is, light Internet celebrity homestays. The selected homestay is a higher level, similar to the combination of wooden bird Simu and Internet celebrities. However, from the perspective of Baidu Index and Tujia’s main traffic sources, Tujia’s main user base is distributed among 30-39 years old, and former CEO Yang Changle once said that orders mainly come from Ctrip’s main website. For Tujia, it may be relatively comfortable to rely on the high unit price consumption habits accumulated by Ctrip business travel users to recommend high-quality and high-priced homestays to users through cooperation with chain homestays.
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Meituan focuses on cost-effective homestays, and the decoration of platform listings is relatively simple and of average quality. Judging from the list of listings, the room and night price of the recommended listings has reached the 100 yuan range, which is far from Muniao and Tujia. On the basis of focusing on low quality and low price, a combination of sky-dropping coupons and landlord red envelopes is given. Under a series of price combinations, the supply chain capability of quality homestays has become a shortcoming of Meituan homestays, affecting the growth of orders.
At the same time, subsidies that one-sidedly use discounts to maintain user stickiness may hide data bubbles. This “subsidy stickiness” faces two major risks: first, the user churn rate soars after the subsidy is stopped, and the sustainability of growth needs to be considered, which refers to the free accommodation of Meituan B&B; The second is to cover up the problem of insufficient attractiveness of real housing. If Meituan wants to move from “traffic harvesting” to “value retention”, it must make some real efforts.
A key role in the competition
Speaking of returning to the investment in Internet celebrity homestays between platforms, the first thing that should be clear is that Internet celebrity homestays are attractive, but they are not the same as universal charging.
Let’s take a look at the Wooden Bird B&B first, this platform is the first platform to take Internet celebrity B&Bs as its main product, and has also gained a certain number of young user groups with the investment of Internet celebrity B&Bs. At this point, it is easy to understand the leading position of Wood Bird Homestay, after all, the supply chain of Internet celebrity homestays takes time to build, and the number of Internet celebrity homestays of Wood Bird Homestay is unmatched among the major platforms. This is also closely related to the huge category of small and medium-sized homestays, and it is difficult for other platforms to expand through chain cooperation in a short period of time.
As mentioned by the author above, while highlighting the characteristics of the property in the listing, Woodbird puts Simu B&B, today’s preferred, and flash booking as important screening conditions at the front end. In 2016, Muniao B&B took the lead in proposing to build a four-star hotel service standard to build a four-star B&B, which is similar to the quality B&B often mentioned at present, and it is easier to get platform traffic for housing that takes into account the characteristics and services of the housing.
At present, Tujia and Meituan also tend to find a way out in the transformation and concentrate resources to create benchmarks. While highlighting the sea view room on the listing page, Tujia put the label of 6 people in the third place, which is also very suitable for the multi-person occupancy promoted by Tujia recently. Therefore, Tujia focuses on special housing for multiple people, which may be aimed at the vacation needs of business travel users. Meituan B&B is more inclined to medium and long-term rentals, amplifying the price advantage of the platform and launching a monthly rental section. And Tujia chose the same road with multiple people. Judging from the listing tag, the upper duplex loft and family room are more inclined to family tour users. And in the revision, the listing evaluation is put into the waterfall on the homepage.
Obviously, in the reference system of homestay platform competition, in addition to the characteristics of homestays, each company has its own extension line. This poses a challenge to the platform’s customer acquisition and operational capabilities.
In contrast, in addition to relying on Tongcheng AutoNavi distribution channels, Muniao also accounts for a certain proportion of brand new media publicity and the repurchase of its own old users.
From the perspective of landlord operation, in view of the fact that Woodbird B&B has chosen the C2C operation model since its establishment, the operation ability for small and medium-sized homestays will be stronger; Tujia B&B has only shifted from the B-end to the C-end in the past two years, and there are still many lessons to make-up; Meituan B&B was established relatively late, and it pays more attention to price, and it is relatively difficult to improve the service side.
For brand chain homestays, it is more common to cast a wide net and take more orders, and these landlords often have their own publicity channels, and basically all platforms will go online to try. The author randomly selected 5 chain homestays in Qingdao, and the same homestay is more willing to list more listings on Meituan and Muniao homestays. To a certain extent, this also reflects the lack of homestay housing caused by Tujia’s excessive investment in the apartment side.
In addition, the top landlords will rarely launch the platform by themselves, so the majority of small and medium-sized homestays have become the main force of the platform’s characteristic housing.
Nowadays, it seems that the so-called homestay platform housing competition is essentially a process of redistribution of the homestay supply chain. With the growth rate of the B&B market, the number of homestay registrations has developed rapidly in recent years, and the three major B&B booking platforms of Muniao, Tujia and Meituan have launched a new round of competition around the supply chain, service, and performance by relying on the advantages of the platform. This competition is not only about the user’s mind, but also about the full-dimensional reconstruction of supply chain characteristics, merchant performance, value-added services, and market development.
