(Travel Daily) Alibaba subsidiary “Taobao Travel” is already an independent company and in the future it will shed the Taobao link to promote itself as an independent online travel brand. TravelDaily has found out that the new brand name will be announced on a press conference taking place on Oct.28 at Beijing.
Taobao Travel is an online travel service owned by Alibaba. It began to be promoted in 2010 and has retail and booking services for airline tickets, hotel, train, guesthouse, and attractions. It also offers customers a wide range of vacation products to choose from.
The name of the new company has not been revealed yet but taking Alibaba’s penchant for animal names into account it’s not difficult to guess that the new name will also be in the animal genre. In the past the Chinese names for Alibaba’s associated businesses were all in the animal genre. For example, their luxury shopping site Tmall is called Tianmiao in Chinese (Literally: Sky Cat). It is highly likely that this new company will be called Feizhu.com (Literally: Flying Pig, and a play on the idiom 'when pigs fly').
Alibaba’s setup of an independent brand shows that they are serious about online travel service and will likely invest heavily in this field. On the 28th of September Alibaba invested 2.81 billion RMB for a 15% stake in hotel IT company Beijing Shiji Information Technology Co Ltd. Shiji Information provides property management systems for 90% of the five-star hotels in China. Alibaba can now leverage the vast amount of information from Shiji Information combined with their Taobao Travel resources, in the setup of their new OTA.(Translation by David)
