LY.com has announced it has acquired a majority stake of Nantong Huihuang Travel for an undisclosed sum.
Nantong Huihuang Travel is qualified for domestic tourism, outbound tourism, inbound tourism and Taiwan tour operations. It has a sterling reputation in the industry and is one of the first four-star rated tour operators in Jiangsu province. It is also among the top ten tour operators in Nantong City and the only tour operator qualified to conduct Taiwan tours in the city.
Following the acquisition, LY.com can now offer Taiwan tours and enter the red-hot Taiwan tourism segment.
The number of Chinese visitors heading to Taiwan has been on a growth spurt in recent years, and a record number of over 1.7 million visited Taiwan in the first half this year, according to the 2015 Q2 National Tourism Data Report by the China National Tourism Administration. In 2014, a total of 3.219 million Chinese visitors went to Taiwan, up 47.06% y-o-y.
LY.com’s director Heping Ma said: “LY.com has always been looking for mutually beneficial partnerships and collaborative development plans such as this. We will share the thousands of users we have in the Nantong area with Nantong Huihuang Travel to help them accelerate development. Nantong Huihuang Travel will retain independent operations after joining LY.com. The acquisition not only makes us qualified to conduct Taiwan tours but is also another step in the improvement of our O2O operations. LY.com will continue to attract talented teams to join us through investment and acquisitions and achieve our goals together. ”
Nantong Huihuang Travel’s director Lina Sun said she was honored to lead her team to join LY.com. She said it felt like making a fresh start with her business having observed LY.com’s strong competitiveness and implementation capabilities within half a month of joining them.
“As an offline tour operator, Nantong Huihuang Travel will leverage OTA LY.com’s rich experience to make a development breakthrough and gain a ample room to scale up operations,” she said. She believes that online and offline integration is a major trend in the leisure travel segment and LY.com has an excellent mutually beneficial development concept which is bound to gain the support and trust of more partners in the future.（Translation by David）
