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Beijing-based Go10000.com, a new Chinese travel vertical or meta search engine, launched its beta-version of the site during EyeforTravel.com's Travel Distribution Summit China earlier this week.

Published: 18 Aug 2005

Beijing-based Go10000.com, a new Chinese travel vertical or meta search engine, launched its beta-version of the site during EyeforTravel.com's Travel Distribution Summit China earlier this week.

Founder and president George Cao spoke to Eyefortravel.com about his company's plans and expectations. Excerpts:

Why are you going ahead with the launch of Go10000.com at this stage?

If you consider the Chinese travel market especially the online travel market it is growing over 50% year over year. With the success of eLong and Ctrip, both went public last year and both are doing very well, couple of trends are emerging inside China. With these companies being successful, other groups like suppliers are concerned about rising distribution cost. At the same time, the traditional travel agencies have just woken up to the fact that Ctrip and eLong are actually taking business away from them. So this group is saying we want some business back and suppliers are trying to take more control of their inventory. The market is quite dynamic and I believe the market will become more fragmented. You need somebody to come up and aggregate information. For example, an average traveler in US searches 3-5 different websites its quite tedious still not sure if you are finding the lowest price for the product or not. With a service like Go10000.com, you will have much less doubts when making a travel purchase decision. And that's good for both suppliers and consumers.

We see features such as pay-per-click getting introduced on like sites like Yahoo in UK and Ireland. What are your plans?

That's what meta-search is all about. To aggregate information, and present them in a user friendly manner. You provide a list of suppliers who sell a particular product. and you provide side by side comparison of this product on price and other attributes, so users can see all this info and feel easier to make a decision.

What are the unique features?

First of all, this is a Chinese travel search engine. This is targeted at the local market. There are some English names of hotels that can be used by local users to identify hotels. For example, some know it as Holiday Inn instead of Chinese name. So its represented like that. That's as much as English we have on the site. The main function of the site is pretty much like other travel meta search engines. You log on to the site, do research, by destination, check in and check out dates, original and destination etc. And then press search, it results in search through multiple websites. And offer price and other information to the user. We actually match the product from the different suppliers so you can see the prices side by side. This is all will be coming in Chinese language.

What's really unique about our product is our hotel product. A hotel product and an airline one are quite different. Airline prices are very dynamic. The seat may be available or not available and the fare may change frequently. Airlines are much more aggressive on practicing yield management. But a lot of hotel suppliers, especially the Chinese hoteliers, are not very aggressive on practicing yield management yet.

The rates are relatively more static. To get accurate airfare, there is a need for real-time information gathering from the websites to make sure one is being offered the right availability of the price. But for a hotel product you don't actually have to do that. Because the price doesn't change that frequently. So what we will do is to cache a lot of data inside our search engine. And give user a really fast response to his/her search.

When you go to Google and type in something, you see a response coming back in less than a second. For search engine, that's one of the basic requirements. We are probably the only one offering a sub-second response on the hotel side. The second thing comparing our engine to the established ones (US-based), we provide true search engine capabilities. Instead of asking user the city name, arrival date, departure date we offer a box like Google...instead we ask you can type whatever you want.

We will offer the best result in terms of the best match or relevance. We give you a list of products. Its very very flexible. For example, user can type Beijing, name of location, couple of dates and head search. The engine offers hotels in Beijing in a certain area. This is quite unique.

Who has worked on shaping such technology?

We have a team of engineers in Beijing. We have one office in Beijing based out of Tsinghua University. And we have a team of 10 engineers. This team has built the product. We have couple of sales and marketing people, since we haven't started marketing activity in a big way.

What is the revenue model?

Like any other search engine, the revenue model is mainly two-fold. One is called CPC (cost per click) and the other one is CPA (cost per acquisition).

The first thing is the marketing question. You have to attract/target the right customer to your side. These guys have to have travel needs. If you can find such people, the second thing is let them buy right here. One of the major barriers for purchase, is the doubt whether I am getting the best deal or not. When you go on the travel site, you see some prices. You aren't sure whether this is the best deal or not.

You will go and search three more sites, you are still not sure. If you are a frequent traveler, you don't even have time for that. Its tedious. But we can search all the travel sites for you close to 100 websites in China. And give you the lowest prices listed and help in making the decision.

How do you assess Qunar.com as a competitor?

Right now, this is the only we know (as competitor) in Chinese language. But I think the strategy might not be the same. If you look at the website, they claim, right now they are only in Chinese, but will be expanding to other languages like English, Japanese whatever they have in the pipeline. For us, the focus is only on China and Chinese language searches. For example, Google and Baidu are search engines. Google used to be ahead but Baidu has now sort of caught up. And the reason why they have caught up with less resources before they went public is their focus. They only do Chinese. They don't claim that they search English well. We are taking a similar strategy and focus on searching Chinese products and Chinese language descriptions. We are going to be the expert on the local market. We don't intend to expand into other countries, at least in the foreseeable future.

What targets have you set for the company?

The first target is really the mindshare target. We want to make a positioning for ourselves, when they think of travel search, they think about Go10000.com. That's the first goal. That's the marketing goal.

If we do try to break-even as our strategy, it may not be our strategy.one example is if you look at eLong, it is losing money right now. Any analyst will tell you that if this company wants to break-even they can do that today. But they keep spending on marketing in order to compete. We have to do the same in the beginning. We have to build a brand. So break-even probably in a year or year and a half in the first quarter of 2007.