China is a big and important consumer market for many businesses, and the hospitality sector is no differrent. In fact, all major hotel groups including Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Accor treat Greater China as an individual segment, separate from Asia Pacific.
As a result, they occasionally publish exclusive offers for just members in Greater China. You don’t actually need to be residing in China to participate, but the main hurdle is you can only take part via Wechat.
Wechat was at the beginning an instant messenger similar to Whatsapp. However it’s now grown into a massive one-stop shop where you can make payment, buy takeaways / cinema tickets, and book hotels. Many of these are implemented in the form of “mini programs”, which are apps inside the Wechat app.
The aforementioned exclusive offers are delivered in such mini programs. I just got 200 Hyatt points by clicking a button from Hyatt’s Chinese New Year promotion.
And 200 IHG points last week from a similar offer.
Wechat isn’t very user friendly to non-Chinese speakers though. If I remember correctly you need two existing users to verify your identity when you create a new account. Although the app has multi-language support, those mini programs are available in Chinese only.
There’s one mini program called Badazhou that I love and use a lot. It is a travel agency that’s automated their integration with Virtuoso, IHG Luxury and Lifestyle, Marriott Stars, Hilton Impresario plus many other exclusive hotel programs. Booking such rates has been made so much easier, as you don’t need to email or call anyone for anything.
No WeChat for me since I can’t read Chinese. But I’m hoping when you find some great travel deals through WeChat you’ll post them in your website!
Yes, I’ve been doing that 🙂
Are on Badazhou only Chinese hotels available, or also international?
Side question, can you make an option for a instant email when you post new content? It’s not regular enough to check daily but I do appreciate the unique content
Thanks for your appreciation! I’ll look into more frequent newsletters.
Badazhou is international and covers all countries. I’ve used it in UK, Europe, Middle East and Argentina.
Cool, appreciate your response! I always use screenshot + Google lens to get me through the chinese language in wechat. But it remains a bit of work, do you have any other ways?
Alipay is much easier with the translate screen overlay on the mini apps
Unfortunately I have no clue