On 16th April, PKFARE announced that it has successfully completed the latest round of tens of millions of dollars in financing. The investors are the Civil Aviation Investment Fund, Hainan Airlines Caesars Travel Group and the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business Creation Fund. 

PKFARE founder and CEO Song Jianchun said in an interview with Tripvivid that PKFARE will use these funds to strengthen its management, business development and operations teams, expand its global network, and continuously expand its product line, in order to make PKFARE as a global trading platform for travel products, providing the industry with simpler and smarter solutions.

PKFARE's products cover airline tickets, hotels, and destinations, and have integrated real-time data from more than 600 airlines, 400,000 hotels, and 20 destination management companies worldwide, serving more than 100 countries with tens of thousands of buyers. The next target of PKFARE is to use products, funds, and customers as the core operating model for constructing a larger trading market to spread externally and form more trading circles.

Establish a complete trading market in three to five years
During the interview, Song Jianchun spoke about an industry phenomenon. For some small and medium-sized hotels, their global supply chain system and their familiarity with overseas tourism products are far behind OTA, which make them difficult to provide products that meet market demand. After seeing this situation, PKFARE hopes to help travel agencies and other buyers in the context of consumption upgrades. PKFARE chooses to start with international airline tickets first. Song Jianchun said that the repurchase rate from PKFARE is about 87%, indicating that the customer's satisfaction with the product is good. In order to ensure their services, PKFARE established a team which can support for nine languages and set up two operation centers in China and the United States. It operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and provides one-stop smart solutions for tens of thousands of buyers.

Scenario chain finance promotes tourism B2B development

The PKFARE co-founder and senior vice president Sui, Xin disclosed that, according to the statistics, in 2017, the OTA and online platform's sales share has reached more than 40% of the total sales volume of airline tickets and hotels in China. In this context, China's small and medium-sized travel agencies are facing a series of operational and development dilemmas, such as increasingly severe situation for attracting customer with single distribution channels, OTA and online platform tightening their settlement rules, making the cash flow pressure increase. Working capital has become a very important factor in limiting or promoting the development of small and medium-sized tourism enterprises. Due to the special nature of the tourism industry and its light assets, it is difficult for small and medium-sized tourism agencies to obtain bank credit. This situation has prompted PKFARE and Zhongguancun Bank officially reached a cooperation on the 16th. Sui, Xin disclosed that the two will work together to develop a travel finance products "credit step", which aims to help small and medium-sized travel agencies to have a better performance on selling airline tickets and hotel on China's OTA platform.

Two-way expansion of customers
In PKFARE's business chain, products, funds and customers are mutually reinforcing factors. At present, PKFARE has cooperated with major global GDS distribution systems, such as Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport. According to PKFARE's plan, the next step will be to broaden its product categories horizontally to achieve more diversified products, increase traffic coverage, and deepen the supply chain vertically to continue to expand global buyers and suppliers as well as increase network nodes. After having more products, it can both increase the increment for the seller and save the cost for the buyer. In PKFARE's current transaction structure, overseas customers and Chinese domestic customers each account for about 50%, and they hope that overseas customers will occupy a larger proportion in the future, because the overseas market is much larger than the Chinese market, and also due to the higher degree of asymmetrical information of the overseas market as well as a higher demand for effective solutions. In PKFARE’s logic, the expansion of customers is two-way.

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