Livestreams prompt travel dreams

Liang Jianzhang uttered 30 hotel names in fewer than 20 seconds while clad in a pink robe specific to the traditional Beijing comedic stage-performance genre, cross-talk. The 51-year-old was livestreaming from Tianjin to sell travel products.

Liang co-founded Trip.com Group, a major Chinese online travel agency based in Shanghai.

The stream raked in 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) in gross sales in the first minute, he says. The number reached over 46 million yuan by the session's end.

Viewers booked around 12,000 hotel rooms in Tianjin, Shanghai and Hainan province's Sanya. Over 32,000 orders were placed in total.

Livestreaming can bring together the most distinctive products at the most preferential rates and help viewers find their preferred products efficiently, Liang says.

The Tianjin event was Liang's 11th stream to promote tourism since the COVID-19 outbreak has begun to wane in much of the country since March.

Liang streamed the previous 10 in different parts of the country, including Hainan, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces.

They generated presales of 520,000 hotels rooms, with discount values totaling up to 100 million yuan.