In recent years, parent-child tourism has been very popular in the tourism market. In 2013, after the popular parent-child variety show “Where are We Going, Dad?” was broadcast, parent-child tourism triggered a big boom. Each online travel enterprise has seized this opportunity, launched their own family tour plate, in order to share the family tour blue ocean market.

According to the summer travel booking information compiled by the China Tourism Academy this year, family travel has become the main force, accounting for 58 percent. It can be seen that the popularity of the parent-child tour market is still not reduced, and the market demand is very strong.

Recently, a news titled “Behind the popular summer parent-child tourism: Serious Product homogeneity, Content is not worthy of the name” was on the weibo hot search list, in a short time obtained a large number of netizens forward and comment, and then triggered a lot of public and media attention, the market parent-child tourism products were once questioned by the public.

Parent-child travel is also difficult to mask the pain of the industry

Although parent-child tourism products are popular in the market, their pain points have not been effectively solved.

Pain point 1: parent-child travel products are not worthy of the name. According to news reports, behind the popularity of parent-child tourism, there is a problem of the prevalence of fake parent-child tourism products.

Most of the parent-child tourism products on the market today are just adding the word “parent-child” after a long list of destination names, and the content is not much different from other standard tourism products. For example, there is a “Yunnan + Kunming + Dali + Lijiang + Yulong Snow Mountain group tour for 6 days and 5 nights”. In the itinerary, there is no parent-child element except peppa Pig fans and peppa Pig stickers for each child. In addition, the arrangement of scenic spots on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is not suitable for some younger children.

Pain point two: product development lack of innovation, serious homogenization, no new ideas. At present, there are many kinds of parent-child tourism products in the market, but there are few parent-child tourism products with distinct themes, exclusive and characteristics.

Surveys show that more than 70 percent of parent-child tourists choose zoos, theme parks and other scenic spots as their destinations. Therefore, most developers still use the traditional “scenic spot + hotel” development mode, mostly around the theme park, water park, zoo and other projects for development and design, product development innovation ability is poor, no new ideas.

In addition, the difficulty and high cost of exclusive product development make many online tourism platforms give up. Although the quality of independently developed parent-child products is good, the high price cannot bring the advantage of high sales, so many online tourism platforms have reduced the development of new products.

Pain point three: product supply is insufficient, the gap is huge. According to lvmama’s 2018 Family Trip Consumption Report, from January to April, the number of family trip trips on the platform increased by nearly 1.6 times compared with last year. According to Data from Ctrip, the market size of online parent-child travel reached 20.79 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of more than 80%, and is expected to reach nearly 50 billion yuan in 2018.

With the increasing number of parent-child family trips and the rapid expansion of the tourism market, online tourism platforms cannot keep up with the pace of updating, and parent-child tourism products cannot meet the market demand. As a result, many tourism enterprises pretend to be parent-child tourism products with standard tourism products to fill the gap of parent-child tourism products.

Pain point four: the providers of products and services are mixed, and the industry standards are not unified.

At present, parent-child tourism products in the market are not all from tourism enterprises. Online tourism platforms can provide parent-child tourism products, offline travel agencies can provide parent-child tourism products, and even scenic spots, hotels and schools, as well as some after-school tutoring agencies, can also provide parent-child tourism products independently.

One parent said he and his child had signed up for summer camps organized by the school and trips organized by after-school tutoring agencies. Many tourism product providers just rely on their own positioning of parent-child tourism to develop products and services, industry standards are not unified, resulting in parent-child tourism products are uneven, parent-child tourism market mixed phenomenon.

The OTA giants are suffering from the turmoil in the industry

Although the “family tour” market has become larger and larger, it is still in the stage of extensive development. Industry chaos is difficult to remove the situation, the online tourism enterprises also have a lot of problems.

For example, lvmama and Tuniu have a small proportion of parent-child tourism, and their product features are not prominent. As can be seen from donkey mother’s Donkey Joy parent-child section, Donkey Joy parent-child tour is divided into four categories, namely baby play tickets, baby weekend, baby domestic tour and baby see the world. Tuniu melon and fruit parent-child tour plate is divided into parent-child tour China, rest assured cruise tour, parent-child look at the world and travel way of four categories, these categories of product types are not rich.

However, Lvmama and Tuniu have many categories in other sections, and their products are also rich. Compared with parent-child tourism products, lvmama and Tuniu have more choices. It can be seen that although they have some layout in the field of “parent-child travel”, they have no determination to make the cake bigger, or have the determination to make the cake bigger, but have no ability to do it well.

For example, the parent-child travel products sold on tuniu website are developed by their own, there are certain limitations. Tuniu is similar to JINGdong of OTA industry. All the products sold on its website are its own products. Tuniu screens and designs the products provided by upstream wholesalers, and then packages them into its own products, which are sold online through self-management mode. Although this product sales model is conducive to creating their own brand effect, there is also a certain profit space. However, for consumers, compared with other online parent-child tour platform products are presented by different suppliers, tuniu provides too few kinds of parent-child tour products, and consumers also lack the opportunity to compare prices of similar parent-child tour products.

In recent years, increased competition in the industry has led to declining revenue loss ratios for online travel companies, meaning they get less revenue for every dollar spent. According to the financial data of Lvmama parent Company Jingyu Culture, the company’s net operating income in the first half of 2016 was 2.696 billion yuan, and the net operating income in the same period last year was 1.654 billion yuan, up 163% year on year, but the net loss was as high as 250 million yuan, compared with 133 million yuan loss in the same period last year, an increase of 92.59%. According to the analysis, the revenue loss of Donkey Mama decreased a lot compared with the same period in 2016 and 2015.

Not only the donkey mother revenue loss ratio is falling, so is the way cattle. Relevant data show that tuniu’s revenue loss ratio was 9.22 in the first quarter of 2014, 5.36 in 2015 and 3.74 in 2016. The comparison shows that the revenue loss ratio is in a straight decline. From the development of these enterprises, the development of online tourism business is not optimistic, parent-child travel as a subdivision category is even worse.

Moreover, many online tourism platforms have many segments, and parent-child tourism products are not valued. Take Ctrip as an example, ctrip mainly focuses on business travel, but from the current tourism market demand, leisure travel products (including parent-child travel products) have more advantages in the market. As one of the most important leisure tourism products, parent-child travel products have great market potential. Nowadays, diversified development has become a successful standard of OTA, and parent-child tourism is also a sector with great potential.

From a comprehensive analysis, OTA bosses who seem to have great success on the surface will still encounter many pain points in the process of enterprise development.

Free from corporate pain, OTAs are on the offensive

It’s hard for big OTAs to escape the criticism of parent-child travel, let alone other OTAs that are developing parent-child travel. Therefore, IF OTA wants to conquer the sea of stars in parent-child tourism, it needs to solve its own criticism.

First of all, online tourism enterprises need to carry out fine operation of “family tour” products and highlight the characteristics of tourism products accordingly. Product refinement needs to rely on online tourism enterprises to develop and design more parent-child exclusive tourism products to expand market share; To highlight the characteristics of tourism products, it is necessary to launch some products with parent-child theme characteristics. Now, the exclusive “5·15 Super Cruise Festival” launched by Tuniu, especially for parent-child families to launch parent-child routes; This summer, Lvmama will launch a six-day-five-night Desert star tour and parent-child study tour in Tengger. Ctrip launched the suzhou little gentleman, my fair lady to develop a study tour and so on.

Secondly, online tourism enterprises should mainly design their own products, supplemented by products provided by suppliers, and enrich the types of parent-child tourism products through various channels. According to a special survey, 43.7 percent of respondents expect higher-quality parent-child travel products. Compared with the products provided by suppliers, the products designed by tourism enterprises themselves are of better quality, which can just meet the needs of these consumers. At the same time, for the other part of the consumers who want to buy parent-child travel products at the lowest price in the market, we provide the products of tourism enterprises and different suppliers, so that consumers can have a variety of choices, and give them a price comparison space, so that they can choose the most suitable parent-child travel products.

Finally, the brand model should be upgraded to achieve product diversification and reduce revenue loss ratio. For some enterprises focusing on the development of non-leisure tourism, we can open the leisure tourism market by developing parent-child tourism. Open up the leisure tourism market with excellent quality and rich variety of parent-child tourism products, and form their own brand effect. It is beneficial to increase the income of tourism enterprises, reduce the loss, and save the bankruptcy crisis brought by the decrease of revenue loss ratio.

In a word, online parent-child tourism has great market potential, and it is inevitable that online parent-child tourism will become a very important market in online tourism. If online tourism enterprises solve the problems existing in the development of enterprises, dare to ask themselves, dare to innovate, enterprises want to break through the bottleneck period, become a unique in the parent-child tourism market is not impossible.

Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110