Hotel direct booking platform Zhidingke announced the completion of its tens of millions of yuan Pre-A round financing led by Horus Capital on November 27. The newly raised capital will be used for optimizing and upgrading products, in a bid to increase its clout in the industry and to prove its business model.
Started in June 2015, Zhidingke was formed by integrating Hotel WeChat Products, owned by hotel intelligent ecological operator AmttNet, and medeen.com, a hotel internet marketing solution provider.
The business model of zhidingk.com is based on achieving a win-win for hotels, consumers and the platform. By connecting directly to hotel websites and PMS systems, the platform removes the need for OTAs as an intermediary and helps consumers book best-value hotel products and services leveraging its strengths in services and membership of hotels.
Zhidingk.com has built a relatively mature system for drawing traffic, and has so far completed strategic cooperation with Taoping.cn and Google, which generate traffic and media coverage for the platform through "quality user sharing interface" and "experiential advertising promotion".
In terms of strategy, Zhidingke’s president Ling Wu (formerly Alibaba’s Smart Operations Director) said: "We want to disrupt Ctrip’s and OTAs’ dominance in the hotel reservation market worldwide, which is worth tens of millions of dollars. We’ll focus on ‘direct connection, price comparison, special sale and membership sharing’. We deliver the decision power back to hotel operators, and let consumers choose hotel products and services.”
