The Chinese travel e-commerce site Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP - News) has a new team member - a microblogging ‘robot’ that can reply to users of Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging service, and recommend them hotels or flights.
It’s a smart bit of social marketing, allowing Weibo users to get travel suggestions right from their Weibo app of choice, with no need to even search for info. The Ctrip robot - this is its page - will reply to queries with an answer in a flash, in the form of a Weibo message containing one or two links (pictured above) that should contain the relevant information. In theory, it should save users a few clicks, especially when on their smartphones, and brings the possibility of free publicity as microbloggers might retweet their answers and discuss their trips with friends on the social network.
To ask the automated Ctrip account a question, you could say, for example: “Shanghai hotel @携程 " (pictured right) and it would link you straight to that search page on its site. For flight tickets, you could query something like: “Shanghai Tokyo February 28 ticket @携程” and then the robot will figure out what you’re looking for. Sadly, the robot account doesn’t have the sass of Apple’s Siri, or the audacious awesomeness of the Futurama character Bender .
The feature does raise privacy issues. But then if you’re dumb enough to make a public query about hotels on your Weibo account when you’re setting up a dirty weekend with your mistress, then you deserve to get caught.
For the time being, this Ctrip robot is only on Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA - News) Weibo, not on Tencent’s (HKG:0700.HK - News) or any of the other Twitter-like services.
Sina Weibo has 250 million registered users, giving Ctrip access to a lot of its upscale users. Ctrip needs all the outreach and marketing it can get as it battles eLong (NASDAQ:LONG - News), the Baidu-invested Qunar, as well as general e-commerce sites in China that are beginning to move into the travel sector.
[Hat-tip to the People’s Daily for spotting this]
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