Beijing-based Jointwisdom Information Technologies, formed by restructuring Ctrip subsidiary Brandwisdom and CSHIS, has been launched and will kick off with the China Hotel Industry Index（CHI-Index）project. CSHIS founder and CEO Shiping Jin will be Jointwisdom’s chairman and Brandwisdom founder and CEO Dr. Xiaojun Lin will be CEO of the new company.
Top Chinese OTA and Ctrip is deeply involved in the joint venture via its subsdiary Brandwisdom. At the company’s inauguration, Ctrip co-founder and chairman James Liang said Jointwisdom would consolidate the three business areas of basic software, information communications and data intelligence, integrating property management system (PMS) software products like the Jiaqi and Innmaster into the business. Jointwisdom will develop China’s first hotel industry complete data platform, consolidating industry big data and cloud computing technology to produce smarter solutions for hotels.
Mr. Liang said the hotel industry had recently been facing major challenges such as a supply-demand imbalance, official austerity measures and vicious competition, and an onslaught of online platforms that burst the industry’s price bubble via large-scale offloading of hotel properties. Hotels had to respond quickly to the volatility of supply and demand in the market and secure their market position by promoting differentiation in products and services.
Jointwisdom CEO Dr. Lin said hotel industry’s data could be simply categorized as pre-check-in data and post-check-in data, the former reflecting the needs of the entire market and user preferences while latter indicating the value of hotel products and services.
“Jointwisdom is the only solution that integrates the data of leading OTAs like Ctrip and PMS providers. Up until now the hotel industry had no data interface. We also offer the hotel industry big data solutions for specific needs in the management of the brand, operations and revenue,” he said.
Dr. Lin said Priceline’s acquisition of HotelNinjas and Alibaba’s acquisition of Shiji Information Technologies were signs of a trend that OTAs were integrating with PMSs and leveraging data mining to form comprhensive data platforms for the hotel industry.(Translation by David)
As a Ctrip subsidiary, Jointwisdom is a clear example of the integration of OTA and the hotel industry. Dr. Lin said: “We make hotels respond more quickly to the market by helping them leverage information in management and data for operations. This in turn improves the working relationship between hotels and OTAs and promotes harmony in the whole industry.”
He also said: “Ctrip initiated a platform conversion strategy and recently launched a price comparing function which is a clear sign of its increased openness. Ctrip is lending us its full support and will take the initiative in data sharing. Jointwisdom will focus on integrating industry-wide hotel data and develop a neutral and comprehensive data flow and a big data analysis platform.”
Joinwisdom will also realize industry-wide distribution of its PMS products via cloud. Its current PMS product by CHIS targets mid-range and high–end hotels while its Jiaqi software targets low-end hotels and the Innmaster software is for guesthouses. It will consolidate these software packages to develop a comprehensive PMS with a cloud PMS version and expand its service network from almost 60,000 hotels now to 70,000 to 80,000 hotel by the middle of 2015.(Translation by David)
