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On August 9, a reporter from the "Daily Economic News" learned from Didi that in order to meet the demand for chartered car travel during the summer vacation, Didi launched a chartered car service, which has now been launched in 44 cities and started trial operation.

It is worth mentioning that in the past two years, Didi has continuously explored the incremental space of customized travel based on its basic businesses such as online car-hailing, and has successively launched moving, car rental, chauffeur service and express delivery services. Now that Didi has entered the chartered car business, it also means that its business has been further extended and expanded.

Internet analyst Ding Daoshi told the reporter of Daily Economic News that chartering is a typical customized service. Didi has launched a series of customized travel services based on the comprehensive travel platform in the past two years, which shows that it is too difficult to find growth in the traditional travel market. Meeting users' new travel needs has become the main direction for Didi to expand new growth points.

However, Ding Daoshi also mentioned that it is not easy to standardize and online the chartered car service. For Didi, chartered cars are just a supplementary business and it is difficult to operate it as a main business.

Didi is exploring new travel scenarios with trial operation of chartered car services in 44 cities

"We found that many users on our platform have long-term car-sharing needs with the same driver, such as commuting at a fixed time every day, traveling to multiple attractions in succession, and needing to be sure that there is a car on call for several hours or days." The person in charge of Didi chartered cars introduced that in order to meet the diverse travel needs of users, Didi chartered cars based on all-platform models "came into being."

A reporter from the Daily Economic News learned that Didi Chuxing has previously launched chartered car services in more than 50 cities across the country. This time, Didi Chuxing will further expand and enrich its chartered car services, providing more car models and more price options.

From the Didi Taxi App, we can see that Didi Charter offers three types of cars: Economy 5-seater, Comfort 5-seater and Business 7-seater. Each car type has 6 package options, including 4 hours and 50 kilometers, 4 hours and 100 kilometers, 8 hours and 100 kilometers, 8 hours and 200 kilometers, 10 hours and 125 kilometers, and 10 hours and 250 kilometers.

Didi’s car-charter pricing rules Image source: Didi App screenshot

Ding Dao Shi said that Didi is competitive in the chartered car market in terms of capital, channels and user resources, but Didi will not make chartered cars its main business, but only an organic supplement to its existing business.

Since the beginning of this year, the topic of "online car-hailing market saturation" has once again attracted attention. The transportation bureaus in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, Suzhou, Jiangsu, Chongqing and other places have successively issued risk warnings about the online car-hailing industry. Fujian Putian, Henan Shangqiu and other places have also publicly reminded people to be cautious in entering the online car-hailing industry. Data shows that the average daily number of orders received by online car-hailing vehicles in many places does not exceed 20 orders, and the average revenue per order is about 20 yuan, and the average daily income per vehicle is only more than 200 yuan.

According to Didi's previously released financial report, the transaction volume of Didi's core platform in the first quarter of this year was 3.746 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30.3%. Among them, the total number of Chinese travel orders increased by 27.1% year-on-year to 2.954 billion orders, and the total number of international business orders increased by 44.0% year-on-year to 792 million orders.

In order to continue to maintain growth, Didi needs to constantly look for new business growth.

The chartered car market is a mixed bag, with multiple platforms entering the market

The reporter noticed that in addition to Didi, other platforms including Shouqi Car-hailing, Shenzhou Car Rental, Ctrip, and Qunar all have chartered car services. In addition, there are also a large number of local offline chartered car companies across the country, and the industry is highly fragmented.

The "2024 Summer Chartered Tour Trend Insights" released by Ctrip Chartered Tour in June this year shows that with the increasing demand for medium- and long-distance tours during the summer vacation, "chartered tours" are increasingly favored by tourists who seek relaxing travel and in-depth experience. So far, during the summer vacation, Ctrip's chartered tour bookings have increased by 44% year-on-year in 2023 and nearly 303% compared to 2019. Among them, summer vacation tours, wilderness tours, parent-child chartered tours, and outbound chartered tours have become the highlight trends of this year's summer travel.

According to China Securities Network, data shows that the domestic short-term charter market is expected to reach 40 billion to 45 billion yuan. Despite the huge market potential, the charter industry still faces problems such as inconsistent service content and pricing standards, and opaque offline market charges, which lead to many hidden dangers in the transaction process. During the Spring Festival this year, the incident in which the well-known swimmer Fu Yuanhui was asked for a price by the driver halfway through the charter trip caused heated discussion.

In this regard, Didi said that Didi Charter first emphasizes the clarity and transparency of pricing rules, and clearly marks the basic package fee, overtime fee, over-kilometer fee, etc. to eliminate hidden fees. In terms of service standards, during the trial operation, Didi Charter drivers must have more than 5 years of driving experience and good service reputation, and the selected vehicles must be nearly new cars within 3 years.

Ding Daoshi told reporters that there are many companies that can provide charter services in every city in China. Because it is difficult to standardize charter services, the online proportion is not very high at present. It often involves customized services for some organizations or corporate travel. Internet platforms can do it, but they will not make it a particularly large business project.

Ding Dao Shi believes that the most typical feature of this industry is its dispersion. It is impossible for one or two companies to occupy the majority of the market share. There will still be many companies in the chartered car market in the future, because the nature of chartered car services determines that this is a dispersed industry.

Daily Economic News