The saying “content is king” will never go out of style in any era. As consumption upgrades, China's increasingly large high-end group's demand for high-quality lifestyle and travel experience has brought huge market opportunities to the high-end outbound tourism market. Today's travel products are also becoming more personalized, customized and quality-oriented, putting forward higher requirements for content innovation. The mainland's tourism content market still has room for growth of 5-10 times. Recently, 36Kr came into contact with a team that is engaged in mobile tourism community e-commerce - Hippo Travel Guide.
Hippo Travel targets the middle-income group of young people aged 18-34. It wants to cultivate user stickiness through fragmented PGC or UGC content and enter the outbound travel market through a content community model. Traditional travel content is mostly presented in the form of travel notes with long pictures and text. Hippo Travel does not deliberately emphasize the travel route or the feelings of the entire travel process. The content presentation is more fragmented, personalized, mobile and quality-oriented. It outputs content with niche or characteristic locations as dimensions and establishes a content community, similar to the "Little Red Book" or "What's Worth Buying" in the tourism industry.
Hippo Travel has a small self-media team of 4 to 5 people in some overseas tourist cities that regularly produces PGC content and updates the content once a month to guide traffic with high-quality content. Currently, Hippo’s customer acquisition cost is as low as 2-3 yuan/person.
High-quality content is conducive to cultivating users with high stickiness. When a certain number of high-quality content producers are accumulated and a certain user scale is reached, PGC content will drive the spontaneous production of UGC content, and then start to build a tourism content community, and finally complete the transformation to tourism community e-commerce, forming a closed loop of transactions.
At present, the traffic of Hippo Sojourn is relatively scattered. The WeChat official account has 30,000 fans, MONO has 50,000 fans, and Douban has 10,000 fans. Customer acquisition on the C-side mainly comes from Weibo and Douban. The WeChat mini program was just launched last week. In the later stage, we need to consider converting concentrated user traffic. At this stage, the team is trying to exchange resources with the mobile WiFi rental and visa business teams to increase each other's entrances.
In terms of business model, Hippo Travel plans to take two steps. In the first stage, it will first help users solve the problem of where to go. Hippo plans to cooperate with local tourism bureaus or airlines to help them with overall marketing in the Chinese market and promote local tourism resources. The second stage is to solve the problem of how users play. The platform can analyze the tone of the community through user behavioral data and recommend corresponding specialized tourism products, such as meditating in temples in Kyoto, learning tea ceremony, visiting Japanese sake distilleries, etc.
In addition, Hippo Travel is also trying to develop revenue channels for knowledge payment. From the six dimensions of experience, art, coffee, bars, restaurants, and hotels, a PDF version of the official PGC guide for each tourist city is made. More than 800 copies were sold in March, with a unit price of 15 yuan.
Yu Xiaopan, founder of Hippo Travel, said that the core competitiveness of Hippo Travel is personalized content expression. "Traditional travel communities make content too lifeless. The people and scenery are beautiful, but the content that looks like a running list is boring. Good content itself is the threshold. Only original and interesting things have vitality."
Content + e-commerce is not a new concept. Nowadays, traditional OTAs, leading e-commerce platforms, and media-based e-commerce are all increasing their content. However, it is not easy to continue to produce valuable content. It requires a content production team of sufficient scale to accumulate content for a long time, and hot content with strong communication power is rare. The energy spent in building a content community may be the threshold.
Hippo Travel currently has a management team of 4 people and a content production team of 20 people. Founder Yu Xiaopan serves as the editor-in-chief and operator of Hippo. He has worked in private equity, asset management, and law firms. He is the author of the best-selling travel book "Food Detective Series". The team is currently seeking angel round financing.