Tuniu Upgrades "Niu Attendant" On-Trip Service Again, "Niu Waiter" Makes Travel Simpler

Tuniu.com and China Association of Travel Services jointly released the 2018 Spring Festival Golden Week Travel Trends Report, which indicates that during the 2018 Spring Festival, tourism consumption will constantly increase, and celebrating the Chinese New Year on a trip or by traveling overseas has turned out to be a popular choice for the public.

As the Spring Festival season nears, Tuniu has further upgraded its “Niu Attendant” service to improve user experience, and the coverage of it will expand to airline tickets and hotel bookings from the self-service travel channel. At the same time, it has also specified the service details on a trip, and specially set up the “Niu Waiter” team to provide the exclusive “One on One” service for its customers during their travel.

This “Niu Attendant” service upgrading, which just took place before the 2018 Spring Festival tourist season, will be helpful to more tourists during their trips, and will further enhance the competitiveness of Tuniu in the tourism market.

“Niu Attendant” Service Moves to WeChat, Aimed at Creating a “Super Assistant” for Travelers

In recent years, when people choose their methods of travel, more and more consumers prefer the freestyle self-service travel as opposed to the packaged tours. According to iResearch, China’s online self-service travel market keeps growing rapidly. In 2016, the total market transaction amount reached 54.52 billion yuan. It is predicted that China’s online self-service travel market transaction amount will reach beyond 110 billion yuan by 2019.

Under this market trend, when the “Niu Attendant” was launched at the beginning of 2016, with the Tuniu travel app as the operating platform, the service was bound to serve the people who prefer independent travel. Compared with Chinese domestic self-service travel, the tourists that prefer outbound independent travel have had some previous travel experience as well as enough preparation before they travel. Since the “Niu Attendant” was launched, its service has been favored by a large number of outbound independent travelers. From its launch in February 2nd, 2016 until now, it has become the most considerate “Super Assistant” for outbound independent travelers asking for help. In 2017, when the outbound independent travel market celebrated its prosperous season, Tuniu expanded the “Niu Attendant” service to the Chinese domestic self-service travel market, showing its determination to serve more self-service travelers.

Recently, to provide the self-service travelers with more convenient channels for communication, Tuniu moved the “Niu Attendant” service to WeChat. Meanwhile, those that the “Niu Attendant” is bound to serve have been expanded from self-service travelers to guests who book airline tickets and hotels.

The “Niu Attendant” has already formed the “WeChat Group + ‘Niu Waiter’, Answer + Travel Interaction” model, and has become a travel assistant for more and more travelers. Anyone who books Tuniu self-service tours, airline tickets, and hotels will be invited to join the corresponding WeChat group within three days to a week, for the sake of information sharing or even traveling together.

Providing Four Great Services, “Niu Waiter” Makes Travel Simpler

The “Niu Attendant” service covers four aspects, including “Travel Notes Consultation”, namely providing order consultation, assisting in changing flights, coordinating hotel service, and instantly answering questions such as local information, weather conditions, exchange rates and so on; “Product Reservation on a Trip”, namely local tourism product recommendation, including destination entertainment, entrance tickets, car rental, food, shopping etc.; “SOS Emergency Support and Assurance”; and “Social Communication Platform for Travel”. Through the “Niu Attendant”, tourists can enter a group-chat, and those who leave for the same destination at the same time can communicate with each other, and even travel together.

So far, the “Niu Attendant” service has already covered the major popular tourist attractions of the world and become a thoughtful “partner” for more and more travelers. It has effectively promoted the customer experience, increased customers’ favor of the service, and also pushed forward the increase of Tuniu’s repeat purchase rate.

Notably, Tuniu has also creatively launched the “Niu Waiter” service model, which is uniquely found in the tourism industry. The customer service staff work as the “Niu Waiter”, so that those who don’t like group chats can add the “Niu Waiter” as their WeChat friend to get the “One on One” exclusive service. The “Niu Waiter” service time is from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. However, if emergencies occur, the “Niu Waiters” will usually abandon their usual time schedule. Even if emergencies occur in the middle of the night, they will try to help their customers solve problems at once. In addition, the “Niu Waiter” can also contact Tuniu’s overseas personnel, and try to work with the “Niu Attendant” service, to build up the more efficient supply and demand system. In the future, the “Niu Attendant” will continuously update, so as to provide its customers with richer value-added travel services.

Having always been upholding the service concept of “Customers Must Come First”, Tuniu has designed a perfect customer service system, and keeps specifying its service process and optimizing its service qualities. In addition to the “Niu Attendant” travel service, Tuniu has also set up the “Professional + Exclusive” travel consultant team, which serves its users 24/7. Its services cover all the fields of the tourism industry. From consultation, booking, and during and after the trip to commenting, asking customers questions again, customer maintenance and other aspects that their customers care about, the team provides services in all phases of the trip to guarantee a safe and sound trip.

“Service is the lifeline of the online tourism enterprises. In the time of high quality travel, service appears even more important,” Tuniu’s person in charge says. He also says that Tuniu will constantly improve its service quality so that every customer’s special demands can be satisfied, and its goal of “Make Travel Simpler” can be realized.