This small program will “reduce burden and increase efficiency” for our travel
Years later, when we were sitting in the heating room drinking hot coffee and watching the bus on our cell phone drive towards us little by little, we would definitely think back to the early winter morning when we crowded 211 on Yan'an East Road.
"The bus I was waiting for seems to never come"-in the cold wind, waiting for the bus has become particularly long. A bus appeared at the far end of the road, bringing a glimmer of light, and I walked in and found that it was not the bus that I was waiting for… Finally, the bus came, and it was so crowded that they had to "cross the single-plank bridge." boarding. At this time, if you forget to prepare your change, I am afraid that you will be rushed to half your life by the passengers coming up from behind.
The four major events in ordinary people's daily life are "clothing, food, shelter, and transportation." "Travel" is the last one, but it is the most distressing. That's why there is a classic complaint that has been circulating for hundreds of years, "It's good for a thousand days at home, but it's hard to go out for a while.
The rapid development of smart phones and mobile Internet gives us hope to solve the difficulties of travel. "Travel" is also being more closely and efficiently run through various life scenes such as our clothing, food, housing, and social life.
Tencent travel service that turns complex into simple
In July 2020, the WeChat payment page silently launched a "Travel Service" portal for users in Beijing and Guangzhou, and clicked to jump to the "Tencent Travel Service" applet. Prior to this, a grayscale test has been conducted in Shenzhen for a period of time.
Travel services are divided into two parts: car life, bus and subway, which basically cover the current mainstream travel scenes. From car owners, to public transportation, to online car rental, mainstream people are basically considered.
Car life includes common services such as preferential fueling, driving, maintenance, charging, and car rental. After filling in the car model, license plate number, engine number and other information, you can bind the owner card and use services such as checking and paying violations, car insurance, annual inspection, and querying fuel consumption. Among them, "Preferential Refueling" is a very useful function. You can search for the price of nearby gas stations by location, and you can see where is cheaper.
Mortgage and car loan cram school, three meals of entertainment, clothes and shoes, there are too many places to spend money, and there is one more place to save money.
"Car-moving code" uses a small program code and corresponding virtual number to avoid the risk of mobile phone number leakage. Scanning the "Car Removal Code", you can make a virtual phone call or send a WeChat message to notify the owner of the car.
The map data of the bus section comes from Tencent Maps, which supports searching by station and vehicle, and provides information such as bus number and arrival time in real time.
At the bottom of the bus section page, there are also service modules such as "take the subway" and "take the bus". Click to open the subway or bus code mini program of the corresponding city.
These tools can't save users money, but they can provide a lot of convenience. It is believed that many people have experienced the scene of long queues to buy subway tickets before taking the high-speed rail to the subway in other cities. The subway and bus ride codes are a powerful tool to solve the problem of queuing.
The taxi sector can only be seen if you choose to locate Guangzhou, Foshan and Xi'an. Currently in the Guangfo area, it is connected to the "Ruqi Travel" online car-hailing service jointly invested by Guangzhou Automobile Group, Tencent, Guangzhou Public Transport Group and Didi Chuxing. As a "new player" online car-hailing just over a year ago , So far only covers Guangzhou and Foshan. In the Xi'an area, a "taxi" service was provided jointly with the local transportation authority.
For users in other cities, the lack of a taxi-hailing sector seems to have caused the "Tencent Travel Service" to lose the integrity of the platform. However, the Tencent Map app has recently launched an aggregate taxi service in conjunction with Didi, and it is believed that it will soon be transplanted to the "Travel Service" section.
As far as the current situation is concerned, Tencent's travel services are not focusing on making new things, but the most important thing is integration-the integration of traffic and third-party service resources, and on this basis, the exploration of service integration for all scenarios of travel. Is this worth doing?
Incremental value brought by connecting merchants and users
Although most of the functions on the "Tencent Travel Service" applet are integrated existing things, it is actually a new thing in itself. From another perspective, WeChat, as a service window, connects upstream merchants with a large number of downstream users, and adds huge leverage to merchants' service capabilities, thereby improving service efficiency. From medical care and shopping to today's "travel services", every action of WeChat is empowering upstream service providers to bring greater convenience to our food, clothing, housing and transportation.
In history, such things are not new. We can see a very similar situation from another industry.
Before 1915, people's daily shopping pattern was still frequent visits to many stores: buy meat to the butcher shop, buy fruit to the special fruit shop, dry groceries and bread can only be purchased in special stores, and milk is given away. The dairy worker delivers it directly to the customer's door. People at that time couldn't imagine a "supermarket" where almost everything could be bought.
Today, the way we use travel services is actually very similar. The apps scattered on the mobile phone are equivalent to specialized stores, which provide detailed professional services. But if you want to complete the entire travel process, no single app can do it.
In 1915, Astor Market opened on 95th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, USA, and supermarkets in the modern sense started here. It was only then that people were surprised that they could still shop like this, and they could buy enough daily necessities for the whole family in one place. People’s shopping habits have begun to change, which has even affected the production, logistics and packaging of food and daily necessities.
▲ Astor Market, picture from: wikipedia.org
"Tencent Travel Service" seems to give us the same expectations. "Aggregation" seems to be a simple action, but it will bring subtle and important changes to our usage scenarios.
For example, when we used to take a taxi and waited for the driver to come, we might be chatting on WeChat at the same time. At this time, if we want to know where the driver is, we have to switch the app to check it, and then switch back. Now, as long as we pull down on the WeChat homepage, we can quickly open Tencent Travel Service in the "recently used" applet.
For any travel service provider, it is self-evident to connect to more users through WeChat, and the value of user travel data and scenarios is more profound and more important than traffic. From this perspective, such a one-stop travel aggregation service platform can derive a richer ecological level and user operation gameplay in the future.
Innovative gameplay such as "monthly travel card" in Tencent's travel service has shown some signs. The "monthly travel card" includes different service scenarios such as refueling, driving on behalf of the car, car washing and waxing, which is only a one-stop platform capable of doing it. "Invite friends to cheer and earn cash" brings the gameplay of private domain flow into the traditional fuel business.
Looking back at the 20th century, the development of supermarkets also directly led to some new technological advances: barcodes replaced punch cards and became the mainstream technology for tracking goods and inventory management; in European and American countries, credit cards replaced cash as a more mainstream payment method.
It is easy to imagine that a similar subversion is very likely to repeat itself in the modern smart travel scene.
The most critical point is that although Tencent's travel services rely on Tencent's ecology, Tencent did not directly end the competition, squeezing the market space of these service providers, but instead assisted by aggregation and diversion. Reaching more users in a convenient way is a good track for service providers to grow rapidly. We might as well take a look at the past Mobike and the same journey to know how important it is to find a good entrance and a good platform.
Tencent’s TAI3.0, an ecological Internet of Vehicles released this year, will give us more specific support for this imagination: the scene linkage between the mobile phone and the car-machine side also has a broad imagination, and the car can be controlled remotely through WeChat payment and small program entrance. , Check the lock status of the vehicle, initiate a search with one button, and turn on the air conditioner in advance. The car wash and maintenance and refueling services reserved on the mobile phone applet can be synchronized to the car and machine, and the navigation can be initiated directly, and all services can be enjoyed without getting off the car.
The performance of technological progress is often not to make the dashboard of a car as complicated as a fighter plane, but to be more concise and ergonomic, while the car becomes faster, safer and more comfortable. Often, weight lifting is the true manifestation of technological progress and benefiting the people.
This is why "Tencent Travel Service" will appear as a mini program. The current iOS and Android systems have begun to consider how to help users manage complex apps. In the field of travel services, how to “lighten” users is also a question worth answering. Perhaps the small size of the applet is the weight that cannot be carried by the app. The best form.
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