Meituan Hotels Surpassed Ctrip to Lead the Online Hotel Booking Industry in Q2 2018

Meituan Hotels has overtaken Ctrip to rank first in China on the fronts of order volume and nights booked in Q2 2018, according to a report released on August 30 by Trustdata, a mobile internet data monitoring company.

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Meituan Hotels, a subsidiary of the unicorn Meituan-Dianping, has seized 46.2 percent of market shares with the total number of nights booked exceeding Ctrip, Qunar and Tongcheng-eLong combined, as the report shows.

The headline findings also suggested that the Chinese online hotel booking industry grew by 20.1 percent from the first quarter to 91.09 million monthly active users, the largest quarterly increase since 2016.

This growth is coming from an increasingly younger and more geographically diverse user base. Users born after 1980 made up the bulk of the 20 million new users, while users from third and lower tier cities contributed to 50 percent of the online hotel bookings in June.

According to Trustdata, Meituan Hotels, along with Ctrip, Qunar, Tongcheng-eLong and Fliggy was found to be the five leading online travel agency (OTA) platforms that accounted for 96.4 percent of online hotel bookings last quarter.

Fliggy, formerly named Alitrip, is an OTA platform of Alibaba Group that ranked first in customer stickiness in the second quarter. The company, whose Chinese name means “flying pig”, has tapped into the user base of Taobao, its sister company, as Taobao has been directing traffic from the largest e-commerce platform to Fliggy.

Meituan Hotels, founded in 2014, has been benefiting from its sister apps as well. The large user bases of both Meituan and Dianping have contributed significantly to the rise of Meituan Hotels.

Meituan-Dianping, one of the world’s most valuable online local service platforms, also owns Meituan Waimai and Mobike. The company has filed for an IPO at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this June to raise as much as $4 billion according to Reuters.