Alipay: cover all the payment through your journey

Cui ZHANG, Xiaoqing YU

Keywords: oversea payment, Alipay, Information and Communication Technology

In recent 10 years, Alipay as a new mode of payment is sprouting in China. Now, with 700 million users around the world, Alipay has become an important part in the daily life of Chinese people. At the beginning of Alipay, it was created as a third party payment platform like PayPal to solve the safety and security problem of TAOBAO. Gradually, Alipay developed more and more functions including cell phone recharging, paying utilities, credit card repayments, online transfer, etc. According to 2016 Alipay report, 71% of the total payment was finished on mobile system. QR code promotes the transformation from personal computers to mobile devices, which create a huge payment eco-system from daily life to traveling.

Dining in a foreign country can be trouble if you bring a lot of local currencies with you. In all the Lawsons and 7-11 in Japan, you can pay by scanning the QR code through the Alipay App for one bottle of water or an ice cream. Foreign visitors who shop for everyday items at convenience stores “are increasing,” Lawson Chairman Genichi Tamatsuka told a press conference (Jiji, 2017). Instant payment with mobile devices happens in the current exchange rate and often with no transaction fee. With all the statement on the App, you can get a clear view of your spend during the journey.

Airlines are the first to add Alipay to their payment basket. Sharing economy also follow the lead. Uber has announced a global partnership to enable Chinese travelers to seamlessly request and pay for Uber rides from either the Uber or Alipay app (Uber, 2016). This co-operation covers 68 countries, in all 400+ cities where Uber operates. You don’t need to open a dual-currency credit card to take a ride and the payment happens directly in RMB. Airbnb also adds Alipay as an option and 60 percent of new users have chosen to pay with it (Jason, 2014).

Foreign companies, especially shopping malls also can use Ali pay to get closer to Chinese customers. The suppliers can add Ali pay on the mobile, PC or in your stores. The process is simple and clear, 4 steps to get started, which are registration, qualification, application and integration. Till now, more than 10 super shopping malls have already introduced Ali pay to their customers like Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue in the US. And 120 thousand shops in Italy are planning to implant Alipay in 2017. 

Alipay has bigger ambition for the future life style. Recently, a brand new payment way is brought up by Jack MA, the founder of TAOBAO and Ali pay. The future star is called VR pay and is connected to another fancy technology – Virtual Reality. This new payment way enables you finish the deal with staring and nodding while wearing the headsets (Jiang, 2016). Xiaomi and Huawei has become the first group to insert VR pay. In the future, customers can do the payment when they are playing VR games or watching VR live.

Uber. (2017). With New Global Collaboration, Chinese Travelers Can Use Alipay to Request and Pay for Uber Rides All Over The World. [online] Available at: https://newsroom.uber.com/uberalipayglobal/ [Accessed 19 Apr. 2017].

Jiji. (2017). China's Alipay to be accepted at all of Lawson's Japan stores | The Japan Times. [online] Available at: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/01/24/business/chinas-alipay-accepted-lawsons-japan-stores/#.WPdunHdY5E4 [Accessed 19 Apr. 2017].

Jason. (2014). Airbnb Adds Alipay as Payment Option as China’s Digital Influence Grows. [online] Available at: https://www.recode.net/2014/9/29/11631360/airbnb-adds-alipay-as-payment-option-as-chinas-digital-influence-grows [Accessed 19 Apr. 2017].

Jiang, S. (2016). Alibaba's new payment system lets virtual reality shoppers pay by nodding. [online] Reuters. Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alibaba-ant-financial-vr-idUSKCN12C1N8 [Accessed 19 Apr. 2017].

Experiences Airbnb, more than just a place to stay.

By Gabriela Vega and Dayris Martinez

Another reason to love Airbnb, now you can also reserve dances parties in Havana and historical tours around any city in the world.

I personally love Airbnb, I have only had really good experiences using the app. I have even found my house through them and I couldn't be happier.

But it is not only about accommodation anymore, as the way the word is constantly changing also companies have to change in order to survive in the market and Airbnb is not the exception.

It is true that this company changed the way we see traveling and became a strong rival for hotels but not happy with that they went beyond its core business to become a fuller service travel agency.

This amazing company introduce what they called "Trips" which provide tours, activities and other experiences, as well as events. This new service helps tourists immerse in the local community, since the activities and experiences are created and provided by locals.  Right now it is only available in 12 cities but hopefully they will expand to more.

They came with this idea because they were having some problems with the regulations in some countries because in some of them renting a house for a short time is illegal so this allows people to make extra money in a way that might be less controversial than the short-term rental and make the company go deeper into the travel and event market.

“We show people around the way we’d show a friend.” JC. Rodriguez  a former artist in Miami who offers a two-day experience which allows visitors meeting with local artists and create their own pieces said.

I think that is the added value of what Airbnb offers and what make them so unique and a so successful because in the end it doesn’t matter if it’s tourism or events, all it is about to bring the best experience to your customer.

This is a good example of what happen if you have a good understanding of the power of IT in your business whether is tourism or events.

To see the original post please click in the link:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/technology/airbnb-trips-travel-tours-tailored-experiences.html
Photos dowloaded from:
Flickr with out copy right restrictions
https://www.flickr.com/search/?media=photos&license=7%2C9%2C10&advanced=1&text=smiling%20people

Guest in the City – the Airbnb of the leisure industry?

Guest in the City is a collaborative platform allowing French or foreign tourists to book meals and activities with French locals (cooking class, wine tasting, guided tours…). The objective is to offer a friendlier kind of tourism and authentic experiences with locals. People from different nationalities can meet and share their culture and way of living.

The website has been launch in October 2015 by Frank & Véronique Prabel, co-founder of Guest in the City. They decided to develop this project because they found that it is not always easy to meet the locals when travelling. Guest in the City offers a connection between the tourists and the hosts wishing to share their passions or welcome people at their places.  

 Source: http://www.guestinthecity.com/

Everybody can become a member of the Guest in the City community. You can be a French tourist but also an inhabitant of a neighborhood wishing to book and share an activities or dinner with a host staying in your area. In the future the platform would like to expand to the BtoB market and attract cultural or sportive event manager looking for new places, rooms or activities for their events.

But how does it work?  
The tourists or users of the platform can book their activities and pay the price fixed by the hosts directly on the site.

Source: http://www.guestinthecity.com/

Guest in the City takes a commission of 15% on the amount paid by the customers as the service fees but the hosts do not need to pay to publish a post. Each host is selected and validated by the team of Guest in the City to create a community in which tourists and users of the platform can trust and to assure the quality of the services offered. All the posts are available in French and English to increase the number of potential bookings.

100 posts are now available on the platform (April 2016). The objective of the team of Guest in the City is to reach 300 posts by the end of 2016 and more than 1,000 post by the end of 2017.

Surfing on the “collaborative economy” wave, this new start up offers an easy way to give a new dimension to our travels. Useful for both international and national travellers this concept allows travellers to be closer to locals and to discover more about the habits of the place they are visiting. For now, the start up is only starting to work and focus mostly on France but can easily expand to be used for other countries and offer more activities. 

Lucile BESSON & Léa MARET

Sources:

http://www.tourmag.com/Guest-in-the-City-veut-devenir-le-Airbnb-du-loisir_a79811.html

http://www.guestinthecity.com/fr/

http://bonjouridee.com/guestinthecity/

The role of IT on sharing economy in the tourism sector

“Sharing Economy” is a frequently used expression nowadays, which can be defined as “peer-to-peer-based sharing of access to goods and services”. This new way of consuming is also a major trend within the tourism sector. It was revolutionized by the sharing economy in several ways: hospitality is affected by the sharing of individuals’ lodge; Destination Marketing Organization’s traditional offices and brochures are not enough anymore to provide information… Restaurants, car rentals, travel agencies face a new competition coming from individuals or small companies. But these competitors are not the ones you meet in real life: their growth is strongly linked to the increasing place of IT in business. Social media, websites, online communities gave birth to a whole range of services and new kind of companies which competes the traditional tourism industry.

Sharing Economy, a globalized and connected world (© Octo Talks blog)

AirBnb is one of the most recognised one. This website provides an international list of individuals lodging, from a villa to a sofa, everywhere around the world. It is a serious competitor of the hospitality industry and in some countries, legal conflicts are opposing them. Airbnb could not have become what it is now without the emergence of internet. Their competitive advantage was their product: untraditional lodging by the inhabitants. But their relation to IT was also one of the reasons of their success: at the beginning, their online presence allowed travellers from all over the world to book different lodging when and where they wanted, contrarily to traditional hotels which were not at this step of development. The hospitality industry catches up thanks to Online Travel Agencies like Booking or Expedia.

Hospitality is not the only sector concerned by the online sharing economy growth. For example, Shutterbee is a website where people can create travel books, where they record their travel tips, recommendations about destinations… This site, like traveller’s blogs or Facebook pages and groups could have endangered Destination Marketing Organizations which were relying more on bureau and brochures than on the emerging internet. But at last they became an example for the DMO which are now most of the time active on Social Media, with complete websites, like Visit Norway or 100% pure New Zealand. They actually took advantages of both sharing economy and IT by involving visitors and locals in the development of the destination. 

(© Nightswapping blog)

 We assume that what made the success of sharing economy companies may be that they were the first to understand the capital place of IT in consumers’ lives. While traditional tourism companies continued to work as before with premises, providing information through brochures, phone and writing booking, others understood that IT may be the future of business and they launched their concepts with the help of IT. When they became successful, the competition understood that it was time to evolve and join the internet revolution but the sharing-economy was already 3 steps ahead. The apparition of new competitors of another kind seems to have revolutionized the market by endangering traditional tourism industries and thus encouraging them to change their way of doing business.

Sharing economy seems to cause some dangers in matters of security, certifications, leaks of taxes, job uncertainty, lack of qualification… But it is sure that coupled to IT it had an impact on the travellers’ lives and on the whole sector. Thirty years ago, no one would have thought we would organize our holidays through a machine, paying with our credit card without talking to anyone during the process, going to holiday by a car belonging to a stranger, and sleeping in someone else’s bed!

So how do you see the travel industry in 30 years?

Emilie Mika and Agnès Trucco

Sources :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy

http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/how-the-sharing-economy-opens-new-doors-for-travelers.html?id=17950800

https://shutterbee.com/

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/business/airbnb-lyft-uber-bike-share-sharing-economy-research-roundup

Tourism technology: Does consumers really know what is going on behind the scene?

We live in a fast paced environment where technology is one of the most important subjects that influences industries and customers. Tourism industry as we have noticed is such a field that needs and uses IT to develop, design, promote, and market its services. Information technology has a key role in tourism. Technology has an important role in the travel industry, especially in the online travel agencies (OTA’s). Let’s see the latest trends on IT in tourism.  We identified two lately posted cases; the first one is associated with Airbnb and the IT tool that they have designed for marketing and customer purposes, while the second one explains how Expedia has introduced a new tool to update last minute rooms. It seems to us that consumers are driven by technology when booking, planning, or experiencing a trip.

Expedia launches new tool to facilitate last minute bookings

Expedia has just added a new tool to the Expedia Partner Central (EPC) extranet, where hotel managers upload room rates provided to their collaborating travel agencies. The Sell Tonight tool allows revenue managers to update room rates and be visible within 15 seconds across every Expedia and Hotels.com point of sale. Expedia announces this step as a required transformational change in order to push a last-minute price cuts for room rates. This tool has not been introduced to Europe yet: the first hotel partners introducing the tool were some selected hotel partners in Las Vegas by mid-January and later on released to all American hotels. A launch all over the world is planned for a few months later. As the American market is different from markets such as Europe and Asia, Expedia may face the risk of adapting this new IT tool. There may be a reluctant behavior of the hotel managers because they prefer putting low-rate rooms on opaque sites in order to not damage brand perception.

AIRBNB introduce an IT marketing tool to track customers

Airbnb designed a new IT technology, which is a more data-driven approach to marketing a year’s worth of Airbnb growth. The new IT tool is an interactive Airbnb map that is able to show in real time the Airbnb activity all over the world including off guest check-ins and global hotspots. By introducing this marketing tool, the company aims is to show how small and approachable the globe can be with Airbnb.

550K      à checked in on New Year’s Eve

91K         à new guests using Airbnb for the first time

22K         àopened their home to travellers

Andrew Schapiro, Head of Art Department mentioned that; “Part of the challenge of building this experience was thinking through how we can marry the scale of Airbnb experiences happening around the globe with the nature of these experiences. The connections people are making are deeply human and personal. So we decided to take a somewhat whimsical and playful approach with the map, bringing life through figures and geographic elements that represent the diversity of the planet.”

Airbnb seems to follow the current trends. Social media like facebook and foursquare have already introduced this tracking trend, successfully. Airbnb by developing this type of IT tool is managing to remain vivid and competitive through the travel market.

The video shows how the interactive map works: you can see how many guests globally are on Airbnb by real time here.

Planning is associated with LOOKING and Booking implies ACTING. All in all, technology is undoubtedly a valuable tool for both companies and customers. On one hand, IT in tourism is a clever way to track customer’s behavior and facilitate companies to understand customers’ preferences and needs. On the other hand, it can be really useful for the customers as well, since customers become more involved to the service that they are looking for. However, it is important to mention that many steps need to be taken in order to ensure that customers are aware enough of all these technological advancements that are taking place in the travel industry.

Konstantina Tsotra & Greta Erschbamer

Sources:

http://www.tnooz.com/article/expedia-revamps-b2b-extranet-hotels/

http://www.tnooz.com/article/interactive-airbnb-map-shows-people-airbnbing-real-time/

Smart Data: Airbnb's community has reached half a million users worldwide, all gathered on a virtual globe

Airbnb community on New Year's Eve 2014

Airbnb presents its latest creation: an on-line application, which takes the form of an interactive map to treat all current bookings and travels as to gather all Airbnb users on Earth, virtually. The result is impressive as the community has never been so wide worldwide: a million houses and half a million travelers.

But beyond giving single numbers, the platform continues to go forward on the digital world and ends up today with an intuitive map doped with data. No more banal graphs; by offering a continuous overview of its activities in the world, Air Bnb gives a new dimension to the scope of its network.

Airbnb is no longer a single accommodation provider but has been able to create a wide network that gets stronger and stronger everyday. The sharing and interactivity within the Airbnb community is strong as it is the essence of the company. In deed, their business model is base on a collaborative system by the community: the members of Airbnb are both travellers and hosts! The on line network of Airbnb is international: an interactive map gives us an idea about the destinations and travels worldwide. This map, on continuous update, reveals a live and dynamic overview of the Airbnb travellers day by day. 

For New Year’s eve for instance, we learnt that Paris was the favourite destination as it welcomed around 36 000 travellers. The capital was, for a night, the center of the community platform among 190 countries! Picture that; more than half a million people used Air Bnb to book a night throughout the world. It means that only a very few countries (less than 10) were not reached and some hotspots are definitely coming out as most popular destinations.

This map, an innovative tool developed by the company is a good overview on the community of Airbnb along with the a sight on the evolution of travels and destinations. By day, by location or by interests we can extract interesting data from this map to compare, analyse and evaluate the different trends and profiles of travellers using this collaborative system.

For Airbnb, it is obviously a valuable tool to follow its community and strengthen its network. Moreover, if this interactive map and free of access is possibly a benefit for the users to identify the destinations and travel opportunities, it is also a very good marketing campaign by and for Air Bnb, already acknowledged as an “expert” on virtual platform. The company’s creativity has already shown some brilliant results in a previous video during their marketing campaign Welcome to Airbnb.

The young accommodation provider has understood the potential of new technologies (NTIC) to gather and share within people. In 5 years, Air Bnb has been able, thanks to a very creative and innovative step, to attract from 2 000 in 2010 to 500 000 people today to join the community to travel and host worldwide.. In deed, internet is the one thing that has allowed so many travellers to achieve their goal, it is also the strength of Air Bnb which, with obviously a very good understanding of the virtual world, has succeeded in creating a true atmosphere online around their brand. Creativity and innovation seem to be the master words for their performance and Airbnb delivers us today with a solid proof of their success: their wide community spread around the globe.

Click to discover the interactive map! 

Théophile Pelletier et Marine Issautier

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