Alibaba Group Holding’s online travel agency Fliggy has established an alliance with 15,000 lodging service providers to help China’s independent hotels find more clients. The alliance, which started signing up hotels for free in September, now covers 600,000 rooms in 300 Chinese cities.
“The alliance seeks to generate traffic to hotels and provide technical support and intelligent hardware in the future,” said Fan Chi, vice president of the Alibaba Group.
China has about 1 million independent hotels, accounting for more than 85% of the country’s total, according to data from Fliggy. However, these lodging providers usually have less than 80 rooms and lack strong branding and user retention.
