Two of China’s largest hospitality and technology companies will work together to drive innovation in the country’s hotel industry.
Jin Jiang, the state-owned tourism and hospitality company headquartered in Shanghai with more than 8,000 properties across the county, and Tencent, the technology conglomerate that owns WeChat and dozens of other internet-related services and products, have kicked off a multi-prong partnership aimed at accelerating the development of new technologies to serve the travel and hospitality industry.
The two companies have created an open API bank, or iPaaS (integration platform as a service), that makes it much faster and easier for SaaS companies to connect to hotel property management systems, IoT devices and other SaaS solutions.
Lio Chen, senior vice president of the Jin Jiang Innovation Center, says Tencent expressed interest to use an iPaaS system across verticals but had been hesitant to try it in hospitality because of concerns the industry lags when it comes to innovation.
To persuade Tencent to make hospitality its first vertical for the iPaaS, Jin Jiang is also launching an accelerator that will create a pool of startups to use the platform to test solutions across its brand portfolio in China.
Those startups will use the iPaaS system to integrate with Jin Jiang’s hotel systems, reducing the time, complexity and cost for the startup to test its solution.
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