Alipay Makes Further Pushes on Tourism

We’ve seen a lot of efforts out of Ant Financial’s Alipay lately to push Alipay as the payment method of choice for the growing Chinese tourist class. New connections with merchants and even a big new connection with a cruise line make Alipay’s market trajectory pretty clear to the outside observer. Now, Alipay’s rolling out a complete new tourism platform designed to make connection to merchants worldwide that much easier.

The new platform allows for a measure of interconnection between Chinese tourists and a variety of businesses that offer goods and services to such travelers, including airports, travel agencies, and more. With the platform, businesses get the ability to better target Chinese travelers, and give those travelers access to new local offers.

The outbound service allows for the ready download of coupons at any point before or during a trip, and right now, the service accounts for better than 160,000 coupons downloaded every day. Better than half of these—60 percent—are redeemed while users are paying by Alipay in transit.

Plus, Alipay has been ramping up the number of places it’s available. We heard about the recent Scandinavian Tourist Board (STB) effort, but Finpro and Svensk Handel also got involved to help make Alipay available in more places. There’s also been an expansion focusing on Singapore.

That’s a lot of expansion, and all with one central theme in mind: tourism. Alipay has been aggressively pushing to be the weapon of choice for the tourist class, and that actually underscores the growing schism in China in terms of payment system. Alipay is regarded as the “big bucks” system, thanks to its wealth management systems, while competitor WeChat Pay is the smaller-time system that picks up small bills.

If Alipay can become pretty much the unofficial payment system of the tourist class, then it will pretty effectively cement its position as the leader among the wealthy. Why? Because it takes cash and a job that allows time off in order to travel. That makes it a province of the fairly wealthy, and Alipay looks to be doing its level best to be the lead player on that field.