Trip.com and Tencent Reach Cooperation on Car Rental Services
On September 28, the car rental business unit of China’s leading travel booking platform, Trip.com, and Tencent‘s travel services platform reached a new cooperation agreement, providing one-stop online car rentals and bookings for users of Tencent‘s travel services in China.
Since September 20, users have been able to enter Trip.com’s car rental service page by clicking “Car Rental” through “Travel Service” displayed in the “Services” section of WeChat, completing the whole process of login, reservation and payment through an app mini-program. In addition, users can access the transportation services through the Tencent Map app.
“Tencent‘s travel service matches our services. By cooperating with a platform like Tencent, we can expand our one-stop, high-security car rental service to more users, which is also a supplement to our local life businesses,” said Song Zhen, the CEO of Trip.com’s car rental division.
The cooperation between Tencent and Trip.com’s car rental unit is based on the increasing demand for car rentals in recent years. The impact of the pandemic has even given rise to a car rental tour boom. In the first half of this year, Trip.com saw its Chinese car rental business increase by more than 90% as compared with the corresponding period in 2019. Its service covers more than 700 cities and has more than 2,000 types of cars. It has established in-depth cooperation with more than 4,000 car rental companies in the country.
SEE ALSO: Meituan Taxi Joins Tencent’s Ride-Hailing Services Platform
On July 12 this year, Tencent announced that it had launched a taxi service platform in March. Its business model is aggregated ride-hailing service. Tencent does not operate vehicles or manage drivers, but only provides orders for other online taxi service platforms with fleets and drivers.
So far, Tencent‘s travel platform has introduced a number of ride-hailing platforms such as Meituan Taxi, Caocao Mobility, T3 Mobility, Sunshine Mobility, and Shouqi Yueche. Public information shows that Tencent‘s travel services have covered more than 100 cities across China.
Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and President of Cloud and Smart Industries Group, once pointed out that Tencent will not seek to build its own cars. In the future, the company says it will help auto companies build good cars, sell cars, and improve enterprise management efficiency and the user travel experience. The launch of Tencent‘s travel services business and its continuous layout in the ride-hailing services field are important manifestations of its construction of a full travel ecosystem.
