Leading China Booking Site Says Mobile Means Metasearch Isn't Viable

In an end of the year letter to shareholders aimed at calming their fears about an increasingly competitive market in China, an official from Chinese booking site Qunar says that the metasearch model isn't viable in the mobile era. "Much like Kayak.com, we have our roots in metasearch, but directing leads to other sites is NOT a winning proposition in the mobile age," writes Yilu Zhao, Qunar's chief strategy officer. Founded in 2005, Qunar began as a flight metasearch site, directing consumers to airlines for bookings. But as Qunar began offering hotel search, it developed an SaaS platform that enables travelers to complete their bookings within Qunar apps without having to navigate to the hotel site, a process that often led to the loss of a booking. "In anticipation of the mobile potential, we developed SaaS, and then when China went from offline to mobile in 2014, we fully embraced the seism