Trip.com Group’s new travel marketing hub, the Star Hub channel, is now live on the brand’s mobile application. Designed to allow suppliers to expand and enhance their marketing activities on Trip.com Group’s platforms, over 100 leading travel businesses have already signed up, offering a collection of content and products on the channel. These tourism businesses include travel destinations, hotels and tourism property owners, and renowned tourist attractions.
As part of a strategic move into the content marketing space, this is the first time that Trip.com Group has launched an independent platform for its business partners and is set to become the content ecosystem for invited industry partners. Star Hub will support travel businesses to feature their latest news, introduce their products and interact with followers on their own official Star Hub channel. The aim is to transform partners’ roles from suppliers to marketers and operators, with a common goal of providing more traveling opportunities to the app users through the combination of three core sections:
Content
Partners can publish their own content (images, videos, text) to promote their offering on their dedicated partner hub.
Engagement
The hub is easy to navigate, contains partners’ entire offering, and user-generated content that is automatically linked to the partner hub.
Products
Tourism businesses can list and promote products prominently on the dedicated partner hub, with options to highlight special promotions.
With these three core sections, business partners can utilise Star Hubs channel traffic management toolkit to effectively manage and match traffic to generate larger exposure of their products and content offering. The first round of Star Hub channels consists of more than 70 integrated resorts, attractions, over 40 hotel groups and numerous culture and tourism companies. Attractions include Beijing Mutianyu Great Wall, Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower and Taierzhuang Ancient City. Hotel groups include InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, Accor Group and Marriott International. Travel destinations include the Italian Tourism Board, German Tourism Board, Yokohama City and Yamanashi Prefecture.
Some accounts were tested internally, before the large-scale launch of Star Hub, and have achieved fruitful results. Trip.com Group’s first official account, theme park owner and operator Chimelong, has been operating for three and a half months. As of April 27, the number of followers of “Chimelong” is close to 25,000 followers, with 150 million impressions and 1.5 million content views. The number of user interactions reached 20,000.
According to Trip.com Group, the products on Star Hub are still in the process of rapid calibration and iteration. Bo Sun, Chief Marketing Office at Trip.com Group said, “We are very pleased to see the active participation and creation of content from our partners. We are anticipating more abundant marketing tools to become available over the next few months, opening up unseen advertising spaces along the process of iteration, which will be prioritised to offer to our Star Hub partners.”
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