On May 8, Lushang held its "Lushang · New Voyage" 2014 Annual Strategy Press Conference in Beijing. Dai Bin, President of the China Tourism Academy, attended and delivered a speech. Around 300 guests from the tourism, media, and internet industries gathered to participate in the event.
At the conference, Chen Wei, Founder and CEO of Lushang, stated that the company had secured a US$20 million Series B investment from SoftBank China earlier in the year. Last month, it also launched a mobile e-commerce platform focused on local and nearby travel — "Tao Lushang."
The "Tao Lushang" app proposes the product vision of "Independent Travel · Book Freely." Chen Wei explained that, according to backend data from the recently concluded 4.28 promotion, the app achieved over 2 million RMB in mobile transaction volume in a single day, with a peak of 20,000 concurrent users online. Dozens of special offer products, including Disney couple tickets and nationwide round-trip Hong Kong independent travel packages, were snapped up within seconds. The three-day promotion drove sales of over a hundred local travel products, once again proving the vitality of mobile online travel O2O. It also demonstrated that Lushang’s dual-app strategy has begun to take shape as a viable business loop.
"If Ctrip is the department store of travel e-commerce, and Qunar is like Carrefour supermarket, then Tao Lushang wants to be the 24-hour convenience store that serves travelers personally. The goal of Tao Lushang is to adapt to various mobile application scenarios during travel and truly help travelers 'Travel like a local,'" Chen Wei explained.
Today, the "Lushang" app has grown to serve 20 million travel users, while the "Tao Lushang" app sees over 2 million RMB in daily mobile transactions. Chen Wei, Co-founder and CEO of Lushang, believes that "the success of Lushang is not due to luck, but rather to a professional team and operations."
Public information shows that in 2013, Tang Yibo, former senior executive of Ctrip’s vacation operations, and Li Xin, former head of Taobao Travel under Taobao’s Airline & Travel Division, joined Lushang to jointly build a commercialized loop for social mobile online travel. Six months later, Lushang officially launched its second app, "Tao Lushang."
At the press conference, Tang Yibo, President of Lushang, described the relationship between "Lushang" and "Tao Lushang" as: SOCIAL as the foundation, LOCAL as the demand, and MOBILE as the tool. In Tang Yibo’s view, travel, as a leisure and wealth-driven consumer product, always has a social core. What Lushang aims to do now is: first, continue strengthening the "Lushang" app to maintain its leading position as a mobile travel community; second, have "Tao Lushang" build on the experience of first-generation travel e-commerce, focusing on mobile to preserve a great experience for "online travel service bookings," emphasizing the essence of travel life, adopting a dual-curating system (senior professional curators + experienced traveler recommendations) to uncover and showcase the beauty of travel life, and through a platform-based approach, enabling many small yet excellent suppliers to confidently focus on offline service operations; third, cautiously and quickly test and iterate, integrating the underlying content and user systems of Lushang and Tao Lushang.
He proposed that the traditional OTA (Online Travel Agency) concept is no longer sufficient to meet the diverse demands of mobile travel e-commerce. Instead, the focus should be on an ecosystem-based OTA (Organic Travel Agency) built on a full-industry-chain platform. That is, mutual trust between the platform and consumers, mutual trust between the platform and suppliers, and suppliers building mutual trust with consumers through community or social connections, forming a new type of supply-demand relationship based on value alignment after sufficient interaction. Dignified industry players correspond to travelers seeking perfect service experiences; stylish e-commerce platforms correspond to travelers pursuing personalized and liberating experiences.
Li Xin, Co-President of Lushang, also noted that the function of the Lushang app is to record, discover, and make friends. Meanwhile, Tao Lushang is built with a "mobile-first," "social," and "platform-based" approach to create a professional, wireless, and travel-community-oriented e-commerce platform. Tao Lushang integrates tens of thousands of travel destination products to meet diverse consumer needs and launched a 10 million RMB travel protection fund in 2014 to provide users with the best and most reassuring travel experience. Additionally, Li Xin mentioned that the two apps, Lushang and Tao Lushang, are not isolated but interconnected through the "Me" feature, along with the launch of the most considerate membership services. "Currently, Lushang has 20 million users, who have generated over 50 million photos, with user footprints spanning 113 countries and 3,800 cities worldwide," Li Xin explained.