A New Travel E-Commerce Site Gives Chinese Tourists Tickets Galore

Today is Friday, and so it’s the most apt time to profile a startup called “Friday” – or Zhouwu in Chinese. It’s a travel e-commerce site that aims to be the missing link for domestic tourists in China. You see, plenty of other bookings sites can get you hotels and flight or train tickets, but Zhouwu lets you snag venue tickets online, getting you into historical sites, museums, scenic spots, and more.

A booking page on Zhouwu. Click to enlarge.

The Zhouwu.com site gives small but useful discounts on a lot of its venue tickets, and has worked with some places to secure some solid cheap deals, such as one-third off of the price of tickets for the observation deck of Shanghai’s second-tallest skyscraper. The startup was founded earlier this year by a former employee of e-tailing giant Alibaba and has an office in the same lakeside city of Hangzhou, though the startup is based in Shanghai.

In the online travel market, it’s actually more likely to be facing competition from daily deals sites like Meituan or Gaopeng (the Groupon site for China), which both have dedicated travel sections featuring some – though not so many – tourist spot venues. China’s biggest travel booking site, Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP), doesn’t have such tickets – but that could be because it offers far too slim profit margins to be worth doing. A sample survey of attractions in Shanghai reveals that the average price of packages that Zhouwu has for sale is about 60 RMB (US$9.40), which is on the low-end of average per-booking spending on most of the country’s deals sites.

[Source: Toumingti – article in Chinese]