Where is the most cars this summer vacation? It is not Chang'an Street in Beijing, nor is it Shennan Avenue in Shenzhen.
The Duku Highway in Xinjiang, which runs through the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains, has become a large parking lot and is very congested.
It is not difficult to see from the video sent back by netizens that it is not the tourist bus that blocks the Duku Highway, but a series of self-driving cars.
In early July, I inspected Shiyan and found that there were almost no cars in the bus parking spaces in the scenic area, but the parking lot of the car was full.
How popular is self-driving tours? There is no need to say much, but it seems that the travel agency colleagues are not very cold.
I often hear from my colleagues that all the customers choose to drive by themselves, and they have something to do with me?
Is self-driving tour an insulator for travel agencies?
is not in a hurry to get an answer, let’s take a look at my point below.
Duku Highway Traffic Traffic Scenario
Self-driving tour is the preferred method of domestic travel
According to the "China Self-driving, Travel Vehicle and Camping Tourism Development Report (2020-2021)" released by the China Tourism Vehicle and Vehicle Association , the proportion of self-driving tours in the country in 2020 was 77.8%.
There is no doubt that self-driving tours are the preferred way to travel in China.
With the further popularization of charging piles in central and western regions such as Xinjiang, car owners who can only buy green license plates in first-tier cities will continue to join the camp of self-driving tours.
① Why do tourists choose to drive by themselves
I am a self-driving tour enthusiast and have had many self-driving experiences abroad.
I drove by Suhua Highway, which has the most dangerous road conditions in Taiwan Province, China, and the most beautiful scenery of Huadong Long Valley, .
Even if I drive the right-hand steer in Malaysia , I am still quite adaptable, but I personally cannot represent everyone.
My wife doesn't like driving, but if she takes her children to play around, she will stuff the things she uses for the two children in the trunk.
People who have no driving fun have to choose to drive by themselves because it is really too convenient.
When to set off, when to rest, where to eat, and when to get up, you are all controlled by yourself.
Even if you charter a car and ask the driver to drive, you can’t ask someone to take you for a midnight snack at 12 o’clock, right?
② Why do you prefer self-driving tourists on the resource side
is very simple, because the stay time is long and the average consumption is high.
Self-driving tourists are more autonomous than group tourists and will not be urged by the tour guide to go to the next stop.
Enough stay time will generate more consumption, whether it is a scenic spot, a hotel or a restaurant.
Even if it is a shopping mall, it is easier to carry by car and it is easier to buy large and small bags home, and the suitcases of tourists with groups cannot be stuffed with so many things.
So, in recent years, the parking lots of domestic scenic spots and hotels have become larger and larger, but when the peak season comes, the parking space is still not found.
My hometown Nanyue Hengshan Scenic Area, the parking spaces in the Visitor Center have long been full when the Spring Festival, so tourists can only park at the door of the shop outside for a high price.
Street solicitors basically don’t pay attention to people who follow the tour guide flag because all their consumption has been arranged in advance.
③ Why the government likes to drive tourists
may not be paid attention to, I will help you sort out the logic this time.
The direction of the destination government is to revitalize the local economy and obtain higher taxes. Is this true?
The traditional group club-local club-resource side model, the first link of the taxation in this transaction chain is handed over to the source government.
group club deducts profits and hands them over to the local club, and after deducting profits and handing them over to the resource side, to be honest, tax audits in these two links are not easy.
However, the personal consumption of tourists who drive by themselves is only one link in the tourist-resource side, so it is easy to supervise and is left at the destination.
"Build roads first if you want to get rich" is indeed the truth. The better tourist roads in will attract more self-driving tourists. While driving local people to get rich, the government also obtained reasonable tax revenues in , and everyone was happy.
Why can’t travel agencies do self-driving tours?
Xinjiang has been popular this year. In addition to the fact that the Duku has become a jammed person, there are also skyrocketing housing prices.
Check out these real-time housing price screenshots. I can’t afford to live in any case, but there are definitely high-end tourists who don’t care.
What I care more about is how much money can Xinjiang travel agency peers make with such expensive resource costs?
① I can’t make much money in the special peak season
After all, traditional travel agencies are middlemen. The packaged resources are expensive, and the overall price is even more expensive. Although some people are still willing to pay for the order, due to the high average customer price, the gross profit margin has actually declined.
I believe that peers with many years of practical business experience will find that the season is the most profitable, and it is good if they don’t lose money in the peak season.
② I can’t make self-driving tours by packing and moving bricks
I also want to share an experience. When I opened a travel agency in Guilin, the so-called “ customized tour ” I made was also a package of resources.
Once the customer needs to split the quotation, only the fare can make some profit.
Hotels have Ctrip , tickets have Meituan , catering has Dianping, and the fare is not found except for other travel agencies.
. A company that has been accustomed to this kind of "customized tour" for a long time, once the customer drives by himself, he doesn't know how to quote it. It's better to give up if the profit is pitifully small.
only knows how to pack and move bricks, and is not willing to do self-driving tours if you can't do it.
③ The product cannot do without social attributes
It also needs to clarify a concept. Self-driving tours do not mean that tourists can drive their own car at will. They can be used as self-driving tours for products, but more of a travel in a fleet.
But it combines strange car friends into a fleet. The product lacks social attributes and has a very poor customer experience.
In fact, self-driving cars have natural social attributes. Most drivers are fathers, and they have common topics; most passengers are mothers and children, so it is easier to create topics.
If we make enough effort in customer group screening and positioning, event social design, and community atmosphere creation, people who come to participate in the fleet will become addicted.
Things to the extreme is the threshold
Although I talked about today is a self-driving tour, it is actually the same as building a camp, outdoors, and research and study. You must bring your professional spirit to the extreme.
Take Xinjiang as an example. The resource side cost is so high. Should we continue to increase the price difference and make profits, or should we find breakthrough points through services?
① The professional threshold for self-driving tours is actually very high
Personally, I believe that the professional threshold for self-driving tours that many peers disdain is actually very high.
I remember someone said in the community that tourists can install navigation software on their mobile phones anywhere, what else do we need to do?
I replied with one sentence. Try walking in places like Xinjiang's Dahai Road and Qinghai Qilian Mountains. The phone has no signal at all. How do you navigate?
Leading the road is just one of the most basic services for self-driving tours. Last year, I drove 318 and walked more than 2,000 kilometers from Chengdu to Lhasa, and I felt it deeply.
Good self-driving leader, good pilot car + support car, gives tourists a completely different experience than driving by himself using navigation.
Where to rest, where to eat, where to turn into the intersection, there are niche beautiful scenery, which restaurant is not as good as Meituan but it is very authentic, they all know.
Not to mention the safety and psychological counseling brought to tourists by their professional skills in high altitudes and harsh environments.
② Products with thresholds have profit margins
I once wrote in "I haven't lie flat yet, I'll give you some success stories to refer to". From information asymmetry to professional asymmetry is one of the development directions of travel agencies.
For example, there is a very high technical threshold in the field of professional outdoors. Tourists want to play but cannot handle it themselves. At this time, the opportunity for outdoor tourism institutions will come.
If you do not consider the professional threshold in this field, you will start to compete for prices like regular products, and there will be no profit margin.
Self-driving tour has a high enough professional threshold to make some peers who are deeply engaged in this category live a very comfortable life.
A fellow J in Hunan who has been doing self-driving tours for 10 years told me that in addition to all costs including the team leader's labor, he can still achieve a daily profit of more than 50 people.
5 car, 20 customers, 7,000 net profit in 7 days. There is still a little room for group buying on the resource side?
③ sinking cost allows customers to follow you all the time
, and this per capita profit of 50 per day is very transparent and reasonable. Even if you spread it out and tell tourists, there is no problem.
Because many people look down on self-driving tours, this track is not very introverted, but instead will inflict relatively high sunk costs on tourists.
If he minds the profits of these 50 people every day, he plans to change one, which may take a lot of time and energy. Old car friends know that it is not easy to run-in for the team.
As long as we do not make mistakes on our own initiative, the high cost of sunk will make riders follow us, from 318 to 317, from Bingcha to 219, and then cross from 331 to Hainan West Line.
Last words
It is not that few people succeed, but that many people give up.
In the eyes of travel agencies, self-driving tours that are not even a useless person are actually a hot commodity.
But not everyone can eat it. Good self-driving tour products have a high technical threshold and cannot be held by anyone.
But it provides another direction for middlemen with insufficient financial strength, besides becoming the resource party themselves.
Teacher Liu Run recently mentioned a point called "channel service", which I think is completely applicable to travel agencies.
transforms from selling goods (transmitting value) to providing services (creating value). Service is always king, and value creators are always C-position.
You want to continue to make money by moving bricks, and it is getting more and more difficult.
