The complaint rate ranks first in the industry. If you use Fliggy for travel, you as a consumer really need to be careful!

The National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival tourism market has come to an end.

After the freezing of the epidemic in the first half of the year, the "National Day" holiday finally made the entire travel market "warm and bloom". Data from travel merchants on the China UnionPay platform showed that during the National Day holiday in 2020, the number and amount of travel-related transactions in China increased by 90% and 130% respectively compared with this year's "May Day".

Alibaba data shows that during the National Day holiday in 2020, Fliggy's national hotel bookings increased by 50% year-on-year, among which high-star hotel bookings increased by 100% year-on-year, air ticket bookings increased by 16% year-on-year, and scenic spot ticket bookings increased by 16% year-on-year.

With the development of the Internet, third-party business travel platforms represented by Fliggy have indeed simplified consumers' travel methods to some extent. However, due to the lack of user experience on third-party platforms, the defects of their products have gradually been exposed, causing some unhappiness to consumers.

Fliggy’s “third-party shield”

According to the data from the Black Cat complaint platform alone, Fliggy has received nearly 200 complaints since the National Day holiday this year, with an average of more than 15 complaints per day. Although these complaints involve various aspects, almost all of them come from two aspects: one is fee disputes, and the other is lack of experience.

From the perspective of fees, Fliggy is very likely to cause disputes with consumers in terms of refunds and product prices. Netizen @6128322902 said that because he bought the wrong ticket on Fliggy, when he refunded the ticket, he only got 484 yuan for the total price of 2,020 yuan, which was completely inconsistent with the airline's refund standards; in addition, some netizens said that the hotel price on Fliggy was 112.64 yuan, but the invoice issued by the hotel was only 109 yuan. The netizen contacted Fliggy customer service, but the customer service said that the extra fee was a "negotiation fee."

Corresponding to the above disputes, Fliggy failed to meet consumers' expectations and had to face consumers' doubts. However, beyond the expectations of most consumers, Fliggy's customer service attitude was also extremely bad.

An anonymous netizen complained that he bought a ticket on Fliggy and it showed that the ticket was successfully issued. However, when checking the ticket, the attendant told him that the train had been discontinued. The netizen just wanted to refund his ticket money. After contacting Fliggy customer service, the customer service not only interrupted him frequently, but also said, "This is the problem of the Fliggy merchant, and no refund will be given."

Many people may think that the large number of complaints about Fliggy during the 11th National Day holiday were just a temporary problem caused by the platform not being effectively operated for half a year. As Fliggy resumes large-scale commercial operations, the platform itself will take the initiative to correct these problems. However, if we take a broader view, we can find that the above problems have actually been accompanying Fliggy's growth.

In 2018, the "White Paper on Tourism Consumption Rights and Interests" jointly released by the People's Daily Client Travel Channel and Sina Weibo showed that Fliggy's complaint rate was close to 20%, ranking first in the online travel industry; data from the "2020 (Part 1) National Life Service E-commerce Consumption Rating List" released by Diantoubao showed that Fliggy's user satisfaction was only 2.000, and the comprehensive index was only 0.524, receiving a purchase rating of "cautious ordering".

From this data, it can be seen that when it comes to handling the relationship between consumers and platforms, Fliggy has always been unpleasant. So the question is, as Alibaba started out as an e-commerce and service company, it is best at meeting the various needs of consumers. Why is Fliggy's reputation so different from Taobao's simply by changing its track?

In addition to charging fees, what else can the platform do for consumers?

The underlying logic of Fliggy is similar to that of Taobao - both break through time and space and build a bridge between service providers and consumers.

However, the particularity of travel merchants determines that the contradiction faced by Fliggy is not the contradiction between consumer demand and unbalanced product coverage that Taobao is trying to solve, but the contradiction between platform charges and consumer experience.

Unfortunately, however, Fliggy did not realize this contradiction. On the contrary, it is still using Taobao's philosophy to operate its products.

Take the hotel price issue mentioned above as an example. Since hotels have direct sales channels offline and by phone, they are not like e-commerce practitioners who are wholeheartedly attached to Taobao and obey Fliggy. As a platform, Fliggy needs to earn commissions from completed orders. Therefore, it can only start with the "agreement fee" at the consumer level. As a result, the phenomenon of "killing the familiar" and higher prices than offline stores has become a major source of consumer criticism of Fliggy.

Secondly, Fliggy handles business travel orders, and the biggest difference between it and traditional physical orders is that the standards are not unified, the agents are not transparent, and the prices change all the time. Industry insiders revealed that there are layers of "ticket agents" between third-party platforms and airlines, and if they are not handled properly, it will bring two problems.

The first is that tickets cannot be issued in time. During the Double 11 event in 2019, Fliggy launched a "special price ticket" campaign. However, after the event, media statistics showed that more than a thousand users said that the special price tickets they bought were "bug tickets" that could not be redeemed due to the agents' erroneous operations.

Second, it is difficult to refund tickets or extremely high refund fees. It is precisely because of the "barrier" to information exchange between Fliggy and airlines that once a refund occurs, there may be a problem of passing the buck. Faced with this problem, it is not surprising that Fliggy made the decision to deduct as much ticket money as possible from consumers or prevent consumers from refunding tickets as much as possible when there are industry standards.

In the seven years since its inception, Fliggy has become China's leading business travel platform, relying on Alibaba's "golden key" and the first wave of market dividends. However, considering the above three perspectives, Fliggy's overall product orientation is not actually very consistent with the requirements of business travel. This explains why, with the explosion of the travel market and Fliggy's increasing "maturity", consumers' evaluation of it has not changed significantly.

Lei Jun once had a "flying pig" theory: if you stand on the vent of the wind, all pigs will fly. In contrast, although Ali's Flying Pig stood on the vent of the wind and did fly, it did not take consumers with it. In the long run, the higher Flying Pig flies, the worse consumers may fall.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.