Ctrip Gourmet List has recently announced a strategic cooperation offering a streamlined platform for food tours and travel with Koubei, Alibaba’s search engine that provides information about catering and leisure services. This is the largest alliance in the review-driven catering sector.
"The cooperation cashes in on both Ctrip’s and Koubei’s customers, resources and experience from years of operation. We will work together on a strategic level to combine local lifestyle with catering activities, so as to upgrade services and provide convenience to more users,” said Xiaozhou Liu, CEO of Ctrip Gourmet List.
Ctrip Gourmet List and Koubei.com are working on interactions in customer reviews, store exposure, and business coupons. For example, actual reviews and recommendations on Koubei are available when users are browsing restaurants on the Ctrip Gourmet List, and they can help customers get coupon vouchers of the restaurants.
With Ctrip’s backing, Ctrip Gourmet List makes recommendations to tourists of a wealth of restaurant options at destinations. Since its inauguration in December 2016, it has covered nearly 20,000 quality restaurants in more than 100 cities around the world, and 70% of them are international cities outside of China.
Koubei, as a platform that has been offering local services in domestic catering, has built cooperation with over 1.6 million restaurants so far and is registering one-million-plus reviews on a daily basis. By working with Ctrip Gourmet List, Koubei will explore the online-offline catering market to meet increasingly sophisticated demands.