Source: Global Times

【Global Times Finance Report, Reporter Wang Nan】During the summer travel season, the family travel market has entered a peak period. The travel pain points of the group of multi-child families with tens of millions of cases have become a new challenge for tourism industry supply-chain transformation. For a long time, tourism service systems such as accommodation room types, airline ticketing, and scenic-area package tickets have largely followed the traditional design template of “two adults and one child,” making it difficult to meet the real travel needs of families with three or more children. Liang Jianzhang, co-founder of Ctrip, said in an interview with a reporter that Ctrip is carrying out an end-to-end service overhaul aimed at multi-child families, covering multiple areas including hotel room types, flight booking, scenic-area ticketing, and the platform information system. By systematically addressing current service shortcomings, Ctrip is working to create a family-friendly tourism service model that can be replicated and promoted.

Trip.com’s special survey data clearly shows common challenges faced by multi-child families when traveling: 53.8% of the families surveyed reported that there are few room types suitable for multiple children. They frequently encounter unclear add-bed pricing standards, missing children’s supporting items, and the allocation of multiple rooms across different floors. When purchasing tickets, 47.1% of families cannot secure seats together for the whole family; some multi-child families even cannot complete booking for multiple children in one go online at once. 56.3% of parents call for the platform to add evaluation tags for multi-child friendliness, so travelers can directly judge a hotel’s room capacity for multi-child families and how well its facilities match their needs before departure. The root cause of these travel inconveniences lies in the underlying product design logic used across the industry, which mostly takes one-child families as the standard reference.

In response to the series of pain points revealed in the research, Trip.com officially launched a public-welfare travel project, “Trip.com Multi-child Benefits.” It works with industry partners across the chain, including hotels, scenic spots, and airlines, to comprehensively optimize the travel experience for multi-child families. In the hotel segment, fixed benefits are set for families with two children or more: when staying at partner hotels, families can enjoy three benefits free of charge—breakfast for children under 12, free add beds, and children’s welcome gifts. Taking a room rate of 1,000 yuan as an example, a two-child family would need to spend an additional approximate 376 yuan to purchase the above services separately for a single night. Enjoying the benefits in full is equivalent to directly saving about 30% of the room cost. Currently, more than 1,000 parent-child hotels have already joined the program.

“We hope that a multi-child family can stay in one guest room.” Liang Jianzhang explained the project’s original design intent: by adding extra beds for parents’ rooms for free, parents and children can share one room without extra expenses. This is then complemented with complimentary breakfast and children’s gifts to ease the travel burden for multi-child families.

To address the information gap that makes it difficult for parents to verify whether a hotel is suitable, Trip.com has completed a functional upgrade on its app. Details about children’s amenities, the number of occupants accommodated, and multi-child exclusive policies are displayed clearly. Meanwhile, the platform has also built an A/A+ plus two-tier parent-child hotel rating system. It provides comprehensive scores across five dimensions: parent-child facilities, themed activities, exclusive services, nearby entertainment options, and authentic user reviews—helping parents quickly filter and select accommodation products suitable for multi-child travel.

Liang Jianzhang emphasized that “multi-child benefits” is not a short-term summer holiday marketing campaign, but a long-term development strategy by Trip.com for family-focused customer segments, with the summer season serving only as a trial run window. Unlike the industry’s sporadic, one-off discounts, Trip.com takes the lead in unifying service standards. This not only reduces the overall cost for multi-child families to travel, but also provides clear directions for hotels and scenic spot businesses to upgrade and refurbish their offerings, unlocking incremental growth from entirely new sub-segments of demand. Many tourism and cultural businesses also strongly recognize this public-welfare-oriented implementation model. Offering exclusive benefits for multi-child families can effectively drive orders for family travel, achieving a win-win outcome for both social impact and business returns.

Beyond hardware service upgrades, Trip.com simultaneously launched an observational micro-variety show (Set off! Er-er Nu-nu). The program records everyday travel life of multi-child families in a genuine way, objectively showcasing the advantages of siblings growing up side by side. It also highlights how, as multiple children grow together, children naturally improve their ability to solve problems independently and to communicate and collaborate. This helps reduce the public’s anxiety about raising many children. Instead of didactic educational explanations, it uses lifestyle-based documentary content.

When discussing the child-rearing pressure that the public generally cares about, Liang Jianzhang said that raising multiple children has a clear “scale effect,” and the overall marginal cost of child-rearing is lower than what most people previously believe. The total cost of raising three children is usually less than double that of a one-child family. In addition, children’s mutual companionship can also share some of the caregiving pressure on parents, easing anxiety related to time and energy. Looking long term, AI technology is expected to continue lowering the overall cost of family education and child-rearing. Relevant supporting services will still need to be optimized in parallel, based on education and evaluation systems.

At the level of industry development, Liang Jianzhang believes that transforming into family-friendly services has long-term industrial value. The tourism industry has generally entered a phase of competition within existing demand. For multi-child groups, upgrading to more refined services requires only modest additional costs from businesses to open up a sizable incremental sub-market. Trip.com hopes to use its own practices as an industry benchmark, encouraging the entire industry to establish unified, standardized service guidelines for multi-child-friendly offerings. It aims to extend accommodation and transportation optimizations to more scenarios, including local spending and distinctive cultural and tourism experiences.

“In the future, Trip.com will continue to iterate the multi-child family exclusive booking system, expand the supply of connecting rooms and multi-bedroom family rooms, and collaborate with more airlines and scenic spots to optimize ticketing and entry rules for children with multiple siblings, building a complete set of multi-child travel service standards.” Liang Jianzhang summarized that when tourism and cultural services move beyond the old “two adults and one child” template and better match real and diverse family structures, it can fully unleash the consumption potential of parent-child travel, while also providing a brand-new practical sample for fine-grained operations across the service industry.