How to promote your destination to Chinese Tourists with Fliggy?
Fliggy, also known as AliTravel, is a popular online travel platform in China. It is part of the Alibaba Group and offers a wide range of services for travelers, including flights, hotels, and tour packages.
With its extensive reach and user base, Fliggy is a great platform to attract Chinese tourists to your destination.
The Chinese Tourist Market Overview
The Chinese tourist market is diverse and consists of people from various age groups, income levels, and interests. However, they all share a strong interest in popular travel destinations, mobile payments, and social media usage.
It is expected that the year 2023 will bring recovery to the Chinese tourism industry, particularly in the second and third quarters when Chinese travelers are anticipated to travel the most. This is due to the summer months and the resolution of visa issues.
Chinese international travelers have been the world’s biggest spenders in tourism, and Chinese shoppers have been known to spend a significant amount of money on overseas trips. In 2019, Chinese travelers took 154.6 million trips abroad and spent nearly $255 billion, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
Demographics: Age, Income Level, And Interests
A significant share of Chinese tourists are Millennials who have more disposable income and a stronger desire for personalized travel experiences compared to previous generations.
You’ll also want to consider senior tourism due to the rapidly aging population and growing consumer demand from older adults seeking stress-free getaways or trips centered around their hobbies like photography or golfing.
One successful example is Thailand promoting its affordable healthcare services along with stunning vacation spots which attracted numerous senior-aged Chinese visitors in recent years.
What is Fliggy?
Fliggy is Alibaba‘s OTA (Online Travel Agency). Fliggy has its own website but it is also easily accessible via Alipay, which is daily used by hundreds of millions of users.
Alipay is used especially for mobile payments but also for other connected services (food delivery, taxi, booking flights & train tickets, and many more), and as it is the main tourism platform, directly available on the front page, the traffic can be very important on Fliggy.
The app was launched in 2015, and since it has the monopoly of tourism on the Alipay system after only one year it already had 200 million users and the number keeps growing.
Its main purpose is to put forward some suggestions and improvement measures based on the user experience to meet as much as possible the individual needs of users. Fliggy acts as an OTA (Online Travel Agency) and tempts to eliminate the information asymmetry by connecting travelers and hotels and tourism companies.
Considering its fast expansion and important traffic, it is a key platform in the Chinese travel industry.
Fliggy, part of the Alibaba family
Because Fliggy has been developed by Alibaba, it benefits all the advantages of the Alibaba ecosystem, such as Alipay, Taobao, Eleme (take-out app), movies, and more.
By reducing the intermediaries, the costs are cut and by centralizing the information in a categorized platform, the customer experience is even more appreciated.
Fliggy is convinient to use
Since Fliggy is connected to AliPay, the payment process is facilitated and the customer does not have to worry about dealing with a new payment.
However, as a company, you need to have an Alipay account in order to be able to receive money, which is also essential nowadays to attract Chinese customers.
How to Promote Your Tourist Destination on Fliggy?
Make your cover attractive
For each hotel and activity available on Fliggy, the first picture has to be very attractive. Why? You want users to click on it, not on the competitor’s suggestions.
Once on the page of your brand (hotel or tourism activities), Chinese travelers have to picture themselves using your services. The photos are very important, don’t shy away from them.
The beauty of the place is very important. The photographic potential of your destination/hotel has to be very high because taking pictures is an important part of the trip for Chinese travelers. They take many pictures and videos of the place, of them doing the activities, in order to share them with their relatives and social media.
Live-streaming tourism is now a big thing
As it is very popular in China, Fliggy is using live-streaming tours to promote monuments, public places, in Europe and China at the moment.
The idea is to promote destinations for when it is time to travel again. Live-streaming is a fun and engaging way to promote your services/destination. A little bit like a movie trailer would tease you.
To attract Chinese tourists, you need good e-reputation
Chinese travelers, as much as Chinese users need to be reassured, and for this, they do not trust the reviews of official entities and institutions, they only believe in the feedback of previous users.
Your brand needs to have a good overall grade so you can be highlighted by the platform on the home page, or you will appear on the top results because Chinese users often filter their research with the best ratings.
Having many comments and reviews is also very important because the more reviews your services will have, the more the Chinese customer will be willing to come to you. The Chinese customers follow the trends and the more you have reviews, the more it will be attractive for Chinese travelers.
Competitive prices
Due to the variety of options on the platform, it is important to be competitive on the prices. Having the lowest price will be suspicious for the Chinese traveler but being the most expensive will not attract them.
Indeed, Chinese income has increased in the past few years but the customer would not like to pay a high price for service if he can have a similar result for a more interesting price.
Making discounts is also a good way to promote your brand because when filtering the results, the customer can decide to display only the discounted offers.
However, the Chinese customer needs to have the feeling that he is making a good deal.
Special days on Fliggy
In China, there are many special days for many various occasions, both traditional and modern (festivals and commercial dates), and for most of them, it is the perfect occasion to set up adapted commercials, and therefore a great way to attract Chinese customers.
Most of these dates are holidays or an opportunity to celebrate and spend money, such as:
- 11.11 (Single day: the biggest day in terms of Sales on Alibaba)
- 06.01 (Children’s day)
- 06.18 (Shopping festival)
- 05.20 – 05.21 (Chinese Valentine’s day)
- 09.10 (Teacher’s day)
- And many more
The most famous one has been settled by Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba, Single’s Day (11.11). You may think that it is limited to eCommerce but it is much wider than that. Every B2C industry has to offer a discount on those dates.
Therefore, there are strategic moves to make for each of these days. In order to promote your brand to Chinese customers, you have to adapt your to the Chinese Festival Calendar. Spending money on this date is an institution.
Fliggy alone is not enough to attract Chinese tourists
If registering your point of interest on an OTA was enough to get customers we would all be very happy. However, the truth is that marketing a destination/ hotel/tour is more complicated than that.
Just like you, Chinese travelers are decisions maker and they take a lot into account before making a decision.
- Price
- Photo worthy destination
- Convenience
- Build your E-reputation with Word of mouth.
We talked about price, beauty, and Convenience earlier which are Fliggy’s strengths, unfortunately, Fliggy does not tackle e-reputation enough.
Increase your e-reputation to maximize your Fliggy ROI
E-Reputation is the way you are perceived online. With the rise of the internet, it has become necessary that you work on your e-reputation and credibility if you want to get Chinese travelers.
One way to boost your e-reputation is by providing excellent customer service and promptly responding to customer inquiries and feedback. Additionally, actively engaging with customers through social media platforms and encouraging them to leave positive reviews can also help improve your e-reputation.
Also, using Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) can be a great strategy. KOLs are influential individuals who have a large following and can help promote your brand or business. Look for KOLs who have a strong presence on Fliggy and are relevant to your industry or target audience.
By prioritizing your e-reputation on Fliggy, you can increase your chances of maximizing your presence and attracting more potential customers.
So what do people check on Baidu?
- Website: It is in Mandarin, does it rank?
- Wechat account: WeChat has become so mainstream that it is weird not to have an account
- Forums: Are people and the community talking about you on forums?
- Media outlets: Are tourism media mentioning you often?
- Influencers: Kols on various platforms such as Xiaohonshu, Weibo
- Social Media: Are you active on social media? Are people engaging with you?
- Do you have videos on Youku, Bilibili, etc
The more information they can find about you, the better. Not only use Word of mouth but also ORM (Online Reputation Management) to make sure the content you want to rank first ranks first and to deal with possible bad reviews.
We Can Help You Attract Chinese Tourists on Fliggy!
We are a China-based marketing agency offering cost-effective solutions to foreign brands interested in tapping into the Chinese market. Our team of Chinese and foreign experts has the experience and know-how needed to succeed in this lucrative, yet complicated market.
Gentlemen Marketing Agency offers many digital marketing and e-commerce solutions, such as web design, e-commerce and social media marketing strategies, localization, market research, KOL marketing, and more.
Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or contact us, so that we can schedule a free consultation with one of our experts, that will learn about your brand and present you the best solutions for your China market strategy.
