Will the tourism market usher in a content dividend? Hippo Hotel wants to be a "Little Red Book" in the tourism industry

The phrase "content is king" will never be outdated in any era. With the upgrading of consumption, the growing demand for high-quality lifestyles and travel experiences from China's high-end group has brought huge market opportunities for the high-end outbound tourism market. Today's tourism products are also moving towards personalization, customization, and quality, placing higher demands on content innovation. The tourism content market in mainland China still has 5-10 times the growth potential. Recently, 36Kr contacted a team working on mobile tourism community e-commerce - Hippo Travel Guide.

Hippo Travel is positioned as a middle income group of young people aged 18-34, aiming to cultivate user stickiness through fragmented PGC or UGC content and enter the outbound tourism market through a content community model. Traditional tourism content is often presented in the form of long graphic travelogues, while Hippo Residences does not deliberately emphasize the feelings of the tourism route or the entire travel process. In terms of content presentation, it is more fragmented, personalized, mobile, and high-quality, with niche or characteristic locations as dimensions to output content and establish content communities, similar to the "Little Red Book" or "What is Worth Buying" in the tourism industry.

Hippo Travel has a small self media team of 4 to 5 people in some overseas tourist cities that regularly produces PGC content and updates it monthly to provide high-quality content diversion. At present, the customer acquisition cost of hippopotamus is as low as 2-3 yuan/person.

High quality content is conducive to cultivating high stickiness users. When a certain number of high-quality content producers accumulate and reach a certain user scale, PGC content will drive the spontaneous production of UGC content, and then start building a tourism content community. Finally, the transformation to tourism community e-commerce will be completed, forming a transaction loop.

At present, the flow of Hippo's sojourn is relatively scattered. The number of followers of WeChat official account is 30000, MONO 50000, Douban 10000, and the number of customers on the C end is mainly from microblog and Douban. Last week, WeChat applet was launched. In the later stage, it is necessary to consider converting concentrated user traffic. At this stage, the team is trying to exchange resources with the mobile WiFi leasing and visa business teams to increase each other's entry points.

In terms of business model, Hippo Homestay plans to take two steps. In the first stage, it will help users solve the problem of where to play. Hippo plans to collaborate with local tourism bureaus or airlines to assist them in overall marketing for the Chinese market and promote local tourism resources. In the second stage, solve the problem of how users play. The platform can analyze community tone through user behavior data to recommend corresponding distinctive tourism products, such as meditation in temples in Kyoto, learning tea ceremony, visiting Japanese liquor distilleries, and so on.

In addition, Hippo Residences are also trying to explore revenue channels for knowledge payment. Starting from six dimensions including experience, art, coffee, bars, restaurants, hotels, etc., create PDF versions of official PGC guides for various tourist cities. More than 800 copies were sold in March, with a unit price of 15 yuan per copy.

Yu Xiaopan, the founder of Hippo Hotel, said that the core competitiveness of Hippo Hotel is still personalized content expression. "Traditional tourism communities make content too lifeless. Beautiful people and scenery, but content like a journal is boring. Good content itself is the threshold. Only original and interesting content has vitality."

Content+e-commerce is not a new concept. Nowadays, traditional OTAs, top e-commerce platforms, and media based e-commerce are all increasing their content, but it is not easy to continuously produce valuable content. A sufficiently large content production team needs to accumulate content for a long time, and explosive content with strong dissemination power is also rare. The energy spent on creating a content community may be the threshold.

The current management team of Hippo Hotel is 4 people, and the content production team is 20 people. Founder Yu Xiaopan serves as the editor in chief and operator of Hippo, and has previously worked in private equity, asset management, and law firms. He is the author of the best-selling travel book "Food Detective Series". The team is currently seeking angel round financing.