Seek Sophie, the Singapore experiences marketplace, listed its first China supply on 14 September 2026: 25 community-led experiences, all in Yunnan province. The listing came after roughly a year of sustained requests from its community and three multi-week scouting trips to the province, TTG Asia reported. Nothing went live until the team had walked the routes itself.

That sequence is the company’s method, not a one-off. Seek Sophie describes itself on its own site as “a marketplace, but a highly curated one”, with the founders going on the ground to test experiences and screening each one for its benefit to local communities and wildlife. The team, the site says, is “scattered across Asia”.

How it started

Co-founder and CEO Jacinta Lim was previously an executive manager at the insurtech MicroEnsure. Co-founder Lina Gedvilaite was an investment analyst at the International Finance Corporation in Ukraine. The two met during an MBA in 2016 and, as Vulcan Post reported, launched the platform with about 260 listings across Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia. Every listing had been personally tested by the founders, who spent at least two months in each country sourcing supply before the platform opened.

What the Yunnan set looks like

The 25 experiences are built around local hosts rather than a coach itinerary. There is a Tiger Leaping Gorge route led by Naxi guide Nong Bu, a Yunnan speciality coffee experience, and a three-day, two-night Tea Horse Road caravan in Shangri-La with Tibetan guides and glamping. The wildlife tracking is run by former hunters who now work as forest rangers protecting the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey.

Lim frames the curation as a position on capacity rather than a marketing line. “For us, preventing overtourism is really about shaping tourism before a place gets overwhelmed,” she told TTG Asia. A year of demand, three scouting trips and 25 listings is a slow pace by marketplace standards. The company lists what its founders have tested, not what a supplier uploads.

The MICE corporate line

The consumer marketplace is not the only revenue line. Seek Sophie’s corporate business already serves Meta, Google, Disney and ByteDance, and the company is now pushing into international corporate events, TTGmice reported in July. Inbound corporate groups are estimated at 10 to 20 per cent of its overall corporate business.

Lim’s pitch to planners is direct. “Singapore only feels boring if you experience it in the usual corporate way: convention centre, mall, hotel restaurant,” she said. The heritage-led formats the company runs for consumers are being packaged for teams and incentive groups, which gives the curation work a second buyer.

The next twelve months

China is the expansion market. Lim named Sichuan, Chongqing and Xinjiang as the next markets after Yunnan, and the company’s record points to the same treatment for each: sustained demand from the community first, multiple scouting trips second, listings last. On the corporate side, the push into international events puts Seek Sophie in front of the MICE buyers who bring groups into Singapore and increasingly want the same curation when the group travels out.

Travel founders with a story of their own can share it with TravHQ through the site’s contact page.

Key takeaway

Volume marketplaces compete on listing count, and Seek Sophie is betting on the opposite. Its China entry shows what that bet costs: a year of waiting and three scouting trips for 25 listings. For OTAs and DMCs, the lesson is that curated supply in a new market is a scouting budget before it is a catalogue, and for tourism boards in Sichuan, Chongqing and Xinjiang, a curator that screens for community benefit is worth courting before the coaches arrive. We would watch the corporate line most closely, because it is the part of the business that turns curation into repeat orders.

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Meituan, China’s leading e-commerce platform for services, has appointed SiteMinder, the global hotel industry’s leading guest acquisition platform, as its online distribution partner. The appointment marks Meituan’s first partnership with a hotel distribution technology provider as the company looks to expand its hotel inventory beyond its home market of China.

On 1 May 2019, Meituan set an industry record by processing over 2.8 million domestic hotel room nights in one day. By strategically partnering with SiteMinder, the e-commerce giant now has a complete hotel technology stack to attract international hotel markets, beginning with South-East Asia.

For SiteMinder’s 35,000 hotel customers, the partnership with Meituan provides greater access than ever before to market their rooms to the lucrative Chinese traveller market.

“As an uprising international hotel reservation platform in China, Meituan will bring new energy to the market with its huge young generation customer base. SiteMinder’s global presence, combined with its appeal to both large hotel chains and independent hotels, made it the perfect partner for us as we grow our international hotel supply and build on our multi-level technology service platform,” says Mr Zhong Qiang, General Manager of Meituan’s Overseas Accommodation Department.

“SiteMinder is pleased to partner with one of the most respected household names to come out of the Chinese market, and to support them in their growth journey. This partnership represents a great opportunity for hotels globally to further broaden both their distribution options and feeder markets via SiteMinder’s platform and, in particular, further benefit from the ever-growing outbound Chinese travel market,” says Mr James Bishop, Senior Director of Global Demand Partnerships at SiteMinder.

Compass Hospitality, which operates hotels, serviced apartments and resorts across Thailand, Malaysia and the UK, is among the first beneficiaries of the Meituan-SiteMinder partnership. Says the group’s corporate general manager of digital marketing, Mr Rabin Gupta, “I am delighted that SiteMinder and Meituan have struck this new partnership. It is a great opportunity for us at Compass Hospitality to enhance our engagement with the Chinese market.”

Meituan’s technology service platform today has more than 410 million transacting users. The company is publicly-listed in Hong Kong and holds a recent market value of approximately US$52 billion.

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An analysis by Lufthansa Innovation Hub found that funding in the first two months of 2018 reached more than $6.5 billion across 76 deals – a pace that could bring a new record by the end of the year.

Startups creating solutions to make travel more efficient, frictionless and interconnected received a record amount of venture capital funding in 2017. At $25.45 billion, it was a substantial 32% increase over investments made in 2016. And the 2018 figure could be even higher.

These early year investments also signal another trend – mega-rounds of more than $100 million are becoming the norm in the travel and mobility technology sector. Most of the money is funneling to late-stage startups rather than angel and seed-funding rounds.

Of the $6.5 billion invested through February 28, the majority of it went to just eight companies, including Singapore-based ride hailing company Grab ($2.5 billion), Indonesian ride-hailing and payment company Go-Jek ($1.5 billion), Uber ($1.25 billion) and Cabify ($160 million).

In a blog post, Lufthansa Innovation Hub trend and market research analyst Lennart Dobravsky wrote, “For Travel & Mobility Tech, this likely means that the average number of 200 new startups, which we have seen raising their initial funding on an annual basis since 2010, will likely slow down significantly in 2018 while more established and hyped startups will continue to close deals at unprecedented amounts.”

Investors are showing increasing preference for travel and mobility tech startups based in China and India. In 2017, 70% of global venture capital funding went to companies based in one of those two countries, while just 23% went to companies based in the United States and 3% to Europe.

That’s a dramatic change from just three years earlier when Chinese and Indian companies attracted just 14% of the total funding for the year, and 68% went to US-based startups. Additionally, 12 of the world’s 22 most valuable travel and mobility startups are from Asia.

Dobravsky says Asia’s ride-hailing services will continue to be attractive to investors since they have potential for continued growth. Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing, currently valued at $56 billion, provides 25 million rides a day, which is about twice as many as Uber and all other global ride-sharing apps combined. With a population of nearly 4.5 billion on the continent, Didi Chuxing still has a massive untapped audience.

Dobravsky cites electric vehicle startups as another sector to watch, primarily in China where much of the electric batteries are manufactured.

Lufthansa Innovation Hub based its analysis on its own database of about 2,500 travel tech startups both B2B and B2C – ranging from those offering online search and booking to transportation providers and niche segments such as virtual assistants and travel-related data analytics. It tracks venture capital raised by these startups using data from PitchBook.

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Retail brand Muji has branched out into hospitality with its first ever Muji Hotel in Shenzhen, China. The Japanese retailer is best-known for its minimalist homeware products, and the hotel’s overall concept and room design is intended to broadcast Muji’s ‘anti-gorgeous, anti-cheap’ philosophy, as the brand itself describes it.

The hotel is expected to offer a truly immersive experience with its 79 bedrooms, a minimal diner serving up locally sourced meals, a gym, and a 24-hour library. The hotel is outfitted with the brand’s own furnishings, and reflects Muji’s simple, straightforward, and high-quality aesthetic. Natural materials like wood and stone, earthy tones and textures alongside a succinct atmosphere align with Muji’s design philosophy for a ‘pleasant, mindful life’.

The hotel also houses a large Muji shop, which covers 1,726 square meters, making it the third-biggest Muji store in China. Also, on site is a Muji Diner and a space to utilise for events.

The hotel started taking bookings from January 10 this year and had more than 500 rooms booked before its official opening. A one-night stay at Muji Hotel Shenzhen is priced from 950 yuan (INR 9,712). A second Muji Hotel is due to open in Beijing in autumn, with a third one expected to open its doors in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district in autumn 2019.

Brands wading into hospitality isn’t a new phenomenon. Over the past year, there has been an influx of retailers opening hotels to transform into full-fledged lifestyle brands. Fashion companies including Bulgari, Armani and Camper have all launched hotels in previous years, and now companies in the home-goods space are also following suit. With the rise of experiential retail, a large number of traditional brands are now turning to hospitality to move beyond simply selling products, and identify new ways to immerse consumers.

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Delta Hotels, part of Marriott International Inc., has opened the 339-room Delta Hotels by Marriott Shanghai Baoshan in China, marking the entry of the North American hotel brand into the Asia-Pacific market.

The hotel is owned and managed by Shanghai Baolian Real Estate Co. Ltd. The building, with its Georgian-inspired facade, is located close to downtown Shanghai in the city’s waterfront Baoshan district, at the mouth of the Huangpu River. The hotel is near the Wusongkou International Cruise Terminal, which has the capacity to handle 3.6 million cruise passengers every year.

This expansion crowns a fantastic year of growth for the brand as it expects to expand its global portfolio to 66 properties worldwide by the end of 2018, in a statement according to the company. Delta Hotels has been undergoing a rapid expansion ever since it was acquired by Marriott International in 2015.

“We are very excited to introduce the first Delta Hotels by Marriott to the Asia Pacific region,” said Marriott’s Vice President of Brand & Marketing for Asia-Pacific, Mike Fulkerson in a statement.

“Delta Hotels is a premium brand with a clear brand ethos of ‘Simple Made Perfect.’ The Delta Hotels by Marriott Shanghai Baoshan delivers on this promise by providing a full complement of streamlined services in a simple, straightforward way.”

Marriott has been aggressively eyeing APAC with a slew of partnerships and launches via its hotel brands. In August last year, the company announced a joint venture with China’s Alibaba to redefine the travel experience for millions of Chinese consumers traveling abroad and domestically every year. Additionally, it rolled out its mobile check-in feature across APAC with members of Starwood Hotels and Resorts’ loyalty programme, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), now being able to check-in via mobile device in more than 300 hotels across the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong.

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There is not a single industry that has remained unaffected by the dawn of social media, and the travel and tourism industry is no different. Before social media came into the picture, peer reviews and photos of your dream destination weren’t as easy to access. Today, the ease of accessibility to destination information has put the spotlight on why the industry must leverage new media tools to benefit themselves.

During the recently concluded Beijing International Travel Mart (BITM) 2017, Daksh Sharma, Founding Partner at TravHQ, conducted a workshop on ‘Going Global Instantly – Leveraging New Media Tools’ and how the travel industry can adapt to the rapidly changing needs of its audience.

Here are some key highlights from the session:

Pictures speak a thousand words
Social media is the best way to show off any destination, and also boost engagement on your profile at the same time.When choosing a destination, visitors want to take a visual tour of their potential destination; images give guests the liberty to interpret the destination, and social media gives them the opportunity to share their travel itinerary visually. Social media platforms like Instagram, allow people to do exactly that and with travel brands promoting their destinations through peppy contests, the trend helps them engage their followers by encouraging them to share their opinions. Hence, many hotel and homestay owners are tapping into the pool of travellers via Instagram. Take a cue from Eco Habitat in Coorg:

Video testimonials are like 22 carat gold

Video content is booming in China, with 41.5% of the country forecast to be digital video watchers. The most popular apps include Miaopai, Toutiao Video, Kuaishou and Meipai, and even the posts from the most popular destination marketing organizations have visually pleasing, photo-rich content, alongside practical travel information. From boutique hotels to homestays in far-flung areas of the world, everyone is jumping on the video bandwagon.

For instance, the Mount Lavinia Hotel in Sri Lanka made a promotional video for its hotel in the Mandarin language to be able to attract Chinese audience through its video content. Watch the video here:

The Travel Influencer connect

Close to a quarter of Chinese travellers are independent travellers, aged between 20 and 25. This Millennial group looks for inspiration for their next travel by visiting their favourite bloggers, Instagrammers and YouTubers, rather than relying on traditional advertising mediums such as TV, newspapers and banners. This is where travel influencers step in. With followers running into hundreds of thousands (and even millions sometimes), they enable travel brands to reach audiences worldwide. With their unique storytelling through visual content and first-hand experiences of travelling, they are able to influence people in a way like no other. Today, a brand recommendation from an influencer carries more weight than any other endorsement, and many travel properties are vying for the attention of top influencers to boost their destinations’ allure.

Responsibility towards responses

According to travel site TripAdvisor, as much as 93 percent of executives consider the improvement and management of their online reviews as the most important factor to the future of their business. By taking out time to listen to, and respond to guest feedback, travel brands can strengthen their reputation, improve social media performance, and even boost financial outcomes. On the other hand, failure to respond to reviews, especially the negative ones, can cost companies dearly, in the form of lower review scores and overall ratings.

Top DIY tools for social media marketing

While the Internet is awash with new social media management tools, the right ones can definitely make social media content easy to create, curate, manage, schedule and finally, analyze the effectiveness of campaigns. From the most popular image editing app Snapseed, to Canva, the free, graphic-design tool website that lets you create beautiful social media content, and video editor app Quik, these new media tools are beneficial to brands in more ways than one.

Image source: Android Community

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Earlier this month, Chinese OTA Ctrip acquired US startup Trip.com, a travel planning app and website. According to Trip.com, the metasearch site Skyscanner (also owned by Ctrip) will launch personalized travel recommendations powered by the former’s recommendations and reviews. Ctrip also ported the travel recommendation service it acquired to a new domain, www.trip.skyscanner.com, and turned Trip.com into an English-language version of Ctrip’s online travel agency content.

So, what drove Ctrip to bet on using the Trip.com domain to expand its online travel agency business? Travellers have different ways of shopping for the best travel deals. The key to monetize this traffic to your website is adding a layer of intelligence that can ascertain how they would like to travel, which is basically Trip.com’s specialization – algorithm-driven curation of travel recommendations. This was simply complementary to Ctrip’s brand outside of China, which is Skyscanner.

Trip.com uses its Tribes feature to offer results to each traveller to suit their style. The team has extensively worked on contextual recommendations, so when a user opens the Trip.com app, there is information about who the user is, their tribe, their location and other contextual details. This helps the app adapt the content in the form of recommendations, accordingly.

The race to reach and own the customer as early as possible in the booking funnel is one area that sees intense battles in the travel ecosystem. With the help of contextualisation, like in the case of Tribes, companies can easily target even anonymous visitors with content or recommendations. If it resonates with a traveller, it can also result in a conversion.

Ctrip CEO Jane Sun

The deal also means that Trip.com’s expertise would reach out at a global level via Skyscanner. This will lead to more refinement in algorithms, as people everywhere travel differently. This will help Ctrip gear up for personalisation for different markets across the world, thus capturing more consumers.

As the company goes deeper into its algorithms, it would soon be about strengthening the association across the booking funnel, and winning more customers, faster than competition.

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Travellers in the Asia-Pacific region are rising up and how! The driving force behind the current travel boom across the globe, and armed with the latest digital tools, they are on the path to gradually change travel trends, giving precedence to the ‘experience economy’, ‘food-stagram’ and solo travel.

The region has roughly 60% of the world’s millennials, young adults between the ages of 19 and 35, who are also the fastest growing generation of consumers. The lure of this market is such that even Airbnb has plans to invest US$2 million through 2020 to support and promote innovative and inclusive tourism projects throughout Asia Pacific.

Airbnb is not the first company to boost tourism efforts in the APAC region. Many other brands, including AirAsia and Mastercard have recently implemented a range of promotions to boost campaigns and raise awareness through ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian countries), and also and drive bookings. For instance, AirAsia implemented an extensive multi-media awareness campaign bearing the Visit ASEAN@50 logo across all of its operating markets. Mastercard worked with tourism partners in the region to appeal to ASEAN consumers across different countries, languages and cultures. Additionally, China, Japan and Korea supported Visit ASEAN@50 with initiatives such as social media contests and campaigns, travel shows and expos, and even an ASEAN Travel mobile application promoting South-East Asian food and arts.

The Asia-Pacific area is the most dynamic area globally. It consists of some of the economies that have flourished most in recent years, thanks to the expansion of the middle class and an increasing affordability and willingness to travel. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), the sector will double in the coming decade, reaching almost 1.2 trillion in 2026 from its current 650 billion.

Countries in South-East Asia (ASEAN) know how to take advantage of their natural resources to attract tourists. Millennials in the APAC region consider trips as vital and devote much more of their income to travel than their previous generations. The phenomena of solo trips, one that is immensely popular in China, and is also spreading roots throughout Asia, is on the rise. The increase in income of a booming population, the popularity of budget carriers in the region and subsequent drop in air fares, and the growing influence of social media are all playing big roles in bolstering these changes. The experience economy is also taking the lead in shaping trends. According to data by Airbnb, 29% percent of bookings, fall into the food and drink category, including homestyle dinners, specialty cooking lessons, and guided food and drink tours. Moreover, when Airbnb Trips first launched last year, the uniqueness of its offerings was one of the major selling points for this new business.

So far, the travel outlook for the Asia-Pacific region remains robust, possibly even the strongest in the world. Travel companies keen to tap into this region must ensure their data is all up-to-date, or else risk missing this ship of opportunities.

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You weren’t wrong to assume that Didi will have smooth sailing ahead with Uber taken out of the equation. The American cab hailing giant was making some progress in the Chinese market but Didi was too big of a rival to back off without a fierce fight. So Uber decided to focus on other markets where it is on a level playing ground and the Uber China operations were taken over by Didi.

However, it isn’t all a frictionless road for Didi. Despite the massive scale in its home market, the size of the market means that Didi is yet to penetrate deeper into the market and the recently proposed regulations by some provinces could serve a massive blow to the progress Didi has made so far and cut down the number of driver partners to a very small percentage.

Now to make things worse for Didi, China’s Everbright Bank has invested USD 743 million in cab hailing app Dingding Yueche last week. While a relatively unknown name doesn’t sound like a threat to Didi, it is clearly gunning for the giant in its tough time. The proposed law, if implemented, would wipe out major chunk of Didi’s fleet putting Dingding Yueche on level ground in the major cities.

The proposed law could very well be the reason Everbright is investing in this young cab hailing company at this time. It is worth a mention that the bank is owned by China Everbright Group which is a state owned company. Although even Didi has received investments from state owned companies. Whether the investment turns out to be fruitful or not will largely be determined by how the regulations are finalised.

Source: Eco Business

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United Nation Development Program (UNDP) Goodwill Ambassador Michelle Yeoh’s visit to China witnessed a showcasing of energy efficient Fuel City bus at United Nation’s Compound at Beijing.

To highlight clean energy transportation in China, a 12 metre fuel cell bus, supported by UNDP, the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and created internally incorporation with Tsinghua University, SinoHytec and Beiqi Foton Motor, was driven around the streets of Beijing.

UNDP Sustainable Development Goals outlines access to reliable and sustainable transport as one of the top priorities. The award-winning actress highlights the importance of clean energy to be a part of efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce pollution levels.

The actress was heard saying; “I’ve always been passionate about advocating for issues that really matter in life and I am really excited to be working with UNDP to promote the newly adopted SDGs. Access to affordable and clean transport is an urgent issue and today I am looking forward to learning about the benefits of fuel cell technology in China.”

New Energy Vehicles are the new developmental project at UNDP that can be recharged from non-fossil fuels such as electricity and hydrogen, these include electric vehicles, hybrid powered alongside fuel cell. With the financial support of Global Environment Facility, UNDP has been working towards the cost reduction of fuel cell buses for public transport.

The Deputy Country Director of UNDP China remarked; “the increasing demand for clean energy and wide application of hydrogen makes the realisation of a hydrogen economy increasingly prominent and the prospect of a zero-carbon economy a real possibility. We hope this will eventually help in achieving the UN’s SDGs and contribute to making our world a better place.”

Fuel cell emissions produce no combustible gases but only water and unlike electric vehicles, recharge time for fuel cell buses is quick. Having stated that FCVs are the future of clean energy transportation, the buses will begin the third phase of commercialised production.

By showcasing the fuel cell technology UNDP and MOST, with whom they have designed and implemented 2 phases of Fuel Cell buses project, hope to highlight the benefits of reducing dependency on oil and environment that is cleaner to breathe in.

UNDP propels to envisions hydrogen as a primary source of  energy production in the society which is affordable and clean to live.

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