Meituan-Dianping taps into Bed and Breakfast market with the launch of its Hazelnut B&B app

Thu Apr 13, 2017 - 10:13am GMT+0000
Meituan-Dianping taps into Bed and Breakfast Market with the launch of its Hazelnut B&B app

Meituan-Dianping, China’s largest lifestyle service provider has announced the launch of Hazelnut B&B – a bed and breakfast app to take a stake in the competitive B&B industry in China.

Looking for a new revenue stream, the Hazelnut B&B platform is expected to provide approximately 150,000 accommodations in tier-one cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou as well as popular travel destinations such as Hangzhou and Chengdu.

Incubated by Meituan-Dianping, the Hazelnut B&B app leverages the platform’s resource and local operational expertise. It is equipped to deliver high operational efficiency in order to challenge existing players such as Xiaozhu and Tujia.

Meituan-Dianping is a world leading online-to-offline (O2O) local life service platform, connecting more than 240 million consumers and five million local merchants through a comprehensive array of e-commerce services and products.

The company has been involved in the travel sector since 2013, when its hotel and tourism business unit set up an overseas accommodation service on its Meituan and DaZhong DianPing apps – to offer users with more than 120,000 properties in over 5,000 cities worldwide for booking.

“Meituan-Dianping’s mission is to help people eat better and live better,” said Mr. Liang Chen, the Senior VP of Meituan-Dianping and the President of its Travel and Leisure Business Group. “While Meituan-Dianping’s Travel and Leisure Business Group aims to optimize the customer’s overall travel experience by fully circling the travel scenario.”

With the continued robust growth of China’s outbound travel in 2017, the company is now moving into the space of accommodation, as both quality and individualized lodging experience are irreversibly the upcoming trends for Chinese customers.

“As an industry leader, Meituan-Dianping has a well-established track record in cultivating the market during the past decade.But to build on the current success and market leadership, Meituan-Dianping is entering the domestic B&B sharing sector to meet rising demand as the leisure market becomes more sophisticated,” Liang said.

The offerings on Hazelnut B&B are characterized as individualized and diversified, tailored to provide young travelers who are looking for fun with a variety of cost-effective B&B accommodations.

“Most of the current listed accommodations on our app are under the full-rent model, which the property owner rents out the entire space to potential customers. Our full-rent model, comparing to the shared-rent or partial-rent model, will not only help to avoid trust issues between tenants and leasers, but will also help to improve occupancy rates,” said Weihe Feng, the President of Hazelnut B&B.

For now, Hazelnut B&B will continue to expand and diversify its lodging options on the platform, in addition to providing qualified and comprehensive services for individual leasers. On the other hand, the company also looks to introduce additional services such as smart security locks in the future.

Through continuous platform enhancement, Hazelnut B&B aims to become the most valuable and efficient bed-and-breakfast sharing platform for individual leasers in China.

By Vivian Foo, VCNewsNetwork

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