This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. For more stories from WIRED's China issue, click here.
Melissa Yang doesn't want you to call Tujia "China's Airbnb". "Chinese travellers have high expectations of service levels - they wouldn't like it if hosts expected them to take out the trash," says the Beijing-based accommodation platform's co-founder and CTO.
That deep understanding of China's travel-focused new middle class led investors to put $300m into the five-year-old business last summer, at a valuation of over $1bn. Tujia - meaning home or journey - lists 400,000 properties in 294 destinations across China and 353 overseas, and takes 12 per cent on each booking. Now it's going international and entering more Chinese cities. "We'll use every penny to scale up," Yang tells WIRED. "The sharing economy is just starting here."
Yang, 43, studied at the University of Washington and worked as an engineer at Expedia before joining a Seattle vacation-rental startup, Escapia, acquired by HomeAway. She returned to China to work for Microsoft before co-founding Tujia, which employs 4,000 at its HQ and in managing properties. Word-of-mouth has helped build growth, although it was helped by Ctrip, a big travel portal, being an early investor.
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Tujia has avoided some of Airbnb's regulatory issues by partnering early on with local authorities. "We collaborated with government from the start," Yang says. "We signed 160 agreements, from cities to provinces, and in some regions we built home-rental associations to encourage taxpaying."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
