ChinaTravelNews - UTour has made a strategic investment in short-haul travel OTA Yaochufa to form a partnership. In the partnership, the OTAs will link their loyalty membership systems and share resource and channels.
Yaochufa’s short-haul trips will be promoted to Utour’s members via the latter’s online and offline channels and both OTAs will jointly promote targeted short-haul outbound tourism products to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea.
Short-haul trips by car are becoming increasingly popular in China as car ownership steadily grows. Official data on the National Bureau of Statistics website show that there were 154.47 million private vehicles nation-wide in China as of the end of 2014, up 12.4% from the end of 2013. Of this number, 125.84 million vehicles were privately owned, up 15.5%. As more people own cars, drivers are traveling further for holidays and many families are choosing to drive to nearby destinations. These drivers have high frequency consumption rates and tend to stress quality vacation choices. Yaochufa targets these customers and deploys its high-quality short-haul tourism resources, experience and an expert team to offer a large variety of upscale short-haul travel packages to car owners or short-haul travelers.
After forming the strategic partnership, UTour and Yaochufa will jointly promote short-haul travel as well as destination lifestyle products and services like long-haul travel, overseas study and overseas real estate. They will strive to achieve a multi-dimensional outbound tourism experience for high frequency short-haul travel and low frequency long-haul travel.(Translation by David)
