A few days after the closure of the Pinnacle Forum, the "freelance" section was launched on Where to Go Taobao.
Freelance travel was relatively simple. The organization work required for Makino Technology and Taobao was relatively easy. They could be launched directly after the integration of the resources. However, traveling with a group was much more troublesome. The recruitment and training of the tour guides alone would take some time.
Moreover, there were usually more people traveling with a group. It would be more troublesome to coordinate and handle the resources compared to freelance travel. Therefore, it would take at least a month to prepare.
However, freelance travel could make the business of Where to Go Taobao first. Therefore, Li Mu invested a lot of effort in promoting Where to Go Taobao.
YY, Weibo, and Twitter began to promote the advertisements of Where to Go Taobao in first-tier cities in Hua Xia, as well as several major cities in California.
Of course, Li Mu's focus was on tricking Americans to come to Hua Xia, not sending people from Hua Xia to the United States.
This was not because he was narrow-minded. He had fully calculated the consumption level and travel costs of both countries. He realized that no matter how cheap it was to go to the United States, it was still a luxury for the people of Hua Xia.
However, the cost of traveling to Hua Xia was unimaginably low for most Americans.
Netizens in California realized that they had begun to promote a travel advertisement called "Travel to Hua Xia" on YY, Weibo, and Twitter. The advertisement said that for only $1,599, one could fly to the other side of the earth and spend six days and five nights to personally travel to Hua Xia, an ancient civilization with five thousand years of history.
$1,599? Users in the United States could not believe it.
Even a trip to Europe would cost more than that, right?
Many people subconsciously clicked on the promotion link, and the page directly jumped to the English version of Where to Go Taobao. It was the details page of the freelance travel service.
There were more than ten prices to choose from for the freelance travel from California to Hua Xia. The lowest price for a single person was $1,599.
However, even the lowest price was already very tempting.
That was because it included:
1. A direct flight ticket from San Francisco or Los Angeles to Hua Xia in Beijing;
2. Three consecutive nights of accommodation in a four-star hotel in Beijing (including breakfast);
3. A car for the entire journey in Beijing and a simple car translation service;
4. Tickets to the Great Wall of Beijing, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, and other tourist attractions;
5. A direct flight ticket from Beijing to Shanghai;
6. Two consecutive nights of accommodation in a four-star hotel in Shanghai (including breakfast);
7. A car for the entire journey in Shanghai and a simple car translation service;
8. Tickets to a number of tourist attractions in Shanghai;
9 、 Direct flight tickets from Shanghai to San Francisco or Los Angeles
If the user customized the itinerary, three air tickets would cost at least $1,300, five nights of accommodation would cost at least $300, tickets would cost at least $200, a six-day car service would cost $300, and a six-day translation service would cost $200. In total, it would cost at least $2,300.
Most importantly, spending 2,300 USD was very tiring, because he had to do all the work himself. He had to find communication bit by bit, and he even had to bear the cost of trial and error.
Where to Go Taobao would help the user coordinate everything. From the moment the tourist landed, there would be a driver and a car translation to the airport. From the moment the tourist left Shanghai, there would also be a local driver and a car translation to the airport.
Airlines and hotels all had an agreed price discount with Makino Technology. Therefore, the cost for Li Mu was naturally much lower than the market price. The total cost for other agencies was about $1,250, but the actual cost for Li Mu was about $1,000.
As for the car service, he cooperated with a local taxi company. The taxi company would assign a taxi to follow the tourist. The agreed price was $300 per day, and $1,800 for six days, which was equivalent to $220 in US dollars.
As for the car service, he cooperated with a local taxi company. The taxi company would assign a taxi to follow the tourist. The agreed price was $300 per day, and $1,800 for six days, which was equivalent to about $220 in US dollars.
For the car translation service, Li Mu indicated on the details page that it was just a simple English translation, not a high-end translation that could be done at any time. For tourists, university students who had passed CET-4 could actually meet their translation needs. Therefore, Li Mu directly cooperated with 3321. On 3321, he assigned jobs to students who had passed CET-4. He asked them to consider whether to accept the job based on their own situation and time. If they accepted the job, he would pay them $200 per day.
At present, the average monthly salary was only a little more than $1,000. The income of a university student working as a car translation was already considered very high.
This part, converted to US dollars, was about $140.
For the tourist attraction ticket service, Li Mu directly took the group price discount from the state-owned tourism company. Including the tickets for several major attractions, the cost price was only $50.
In this way, the direct cost after conversion was $1,000 + $220 + $140 + $50 = $1,410.
In addition, the Taobao platform research and development, operation, promotion costs, as well as the manpower costs for each customer, added up to about $100. Therefore, in total, it was priced at $1,599. There was still about $90 in profit margin, but Li Mu did not plan to earn this money. Instead, he planned to return it to the customer in other ways.
If there was more than one customer, and they traveled in even numbers, then the price per person could be reduced by $100. The price was $1,499 per person. Of course, this was under the premise that two people stayed in the same room for the entire trip.
This price was extremely cheap for the United States, where labor costs and service costs were extremely high.
In the United States, a car service for a day would cost a few hundred dollars, and a lousy translator would cost one or two hundred dollars a day. In this case, the cost of the car and the translation alone would add up to more than $2,000 for six days.
However, in the hands of Hua Xia and Li Mu, the cost could be kept low enough.
If a couple traveled to Hua Xia for six days and five nights in Yanjing and Shanghai, it would only cost $2,998 …
This price was incredibly cheap for the people of California!
Not only that!
Makino Technology also offered a very awesome subsidy campaign.
If the user purchased the Taobao travel product, and after successfully completing the trip, they could organize the travel experience and photos into a travel note that met the requirements, and they would get a reward of $100.
In other words, if two people spent $2,998 on a trip to Hua Xia for six days and five nights, each person would write a travel note after coming back, and they would get a reward of $200 from Makino Technology. In this way, they would only spend $2,798 for a big trip.
It was a great deal.
Therefore, on the day the campaign was launched, more than 4,000 packages of different price ranges were sold throughout California.
Among these 4,000 people, about one-third of them had a valid visa for Hua Xia, and the remaining two-thirds did not have a visa. However, they were afraid to miss this good opportunity, so they bought the service as soon as possible. After all, Taobao promised that if they failed to get a visa, they would get a full refund.
What Li Mu did not expect was that the California package launched in Hua Xia's four first-tier cities, Yanjing, Shanghai, Yangcheng, and Shenzhen, sold more than 2,000 packages.
The lowest price of Taobao's California package was probably similar to the content of the 1599 package for Hua Xia. It was also a direct flight from a city in Hua Xia to Los Angeles, then from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and finally back to China from San Francisco.
In between, it was also six days and five nights. However, because the cost of service in the United States was too high, the whole process was dispensed with car service and translation service. After all, Hua Xia would learn some English in compulsory education. People who could go abroad had no problem communicating in English, so there was no car translation service.
If the users of the free trip to the United States needed to charter a car or hire a translator, Taobao would also give priority to Chinese car companies and Hua Xia students to undertake the service. This could also bring a little change to the income of some Chinese in California.
This kind of package, which did not have a car and translation service, included a round-trip direct flight ticket, a five-night stay in a four-star hotel including breakfast, and tickets to famous attractions. The cost of the whole package was equivalent to 8,600 yuan per person.
In this era, 8,600 yuan was enough to buy a daily round-trip direct flight ticket including tax, so this price was still very high.
However, if the consumer's economic level was high enough, the top of the free trip package would also be large enough. For example, if the consumer chose the luxury first-class cabin, the round-trip ticket alone would cost more than 70,000 yuan. If the consumer chose a five-star hotel, the price would increase exponentially.
The price of a free trip in Hua Xia went from 1599 USD per person to 38888 USD per person. On the other hand, the price of a free trip in the United States went from 8,600 yuan per person to 188000 yuan per person. However, from the sales situation, at least half of the users who bought the lowest price package.
It seemed that the price of a free trip was what the users cared about the most.
…
On the second day of the sale, there were more than 7,000 users in the United States who bought the package, and the number was still growing.
After Taobao went on sale, users who had visas and time had basically started to prepare for their recent trip.
Just the users who decided to travel from California to Hua Xia in the next week alone had more than 800 people.
The number of Hua Xia users who bought the package had also exceeded the 5,000 mark. More than 600 people were expected to set off from Yanjing, Shanghai, and Yangcheng in the next week to start their own free trip in the United States.
The airline's flight occupancy rate had increased significantly, and this was only the initial stage of Taobao's expansion. Just as Li Mu had said to the Sino-American travel companies, as the promotion spread throughout Hua Xia and the United States, there would definitely be a large number of users from other cities and other states who would choose to set off from the three first-tier cities in Yanjing or the two major cities in California to participate in the cost-effective Taobao free trip. In this way, it was very likely that the routes that had always been full would be full soon.
Schwarzenegger heard the news that at least more than 600 tourists would travel to California in the next week, and he couldn't help but be excited.
Don't underestimate the number of more than 600. This was equivalent to Li Mu sending two charter tour groups to California every week. After all, the full capacity of a wide-body plane was only about 300 people.
If this continued, he believed that it would soon reach 10,000 tourists in Hua Xia every week!
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