Founded in Australia, Cozitrip helps Chinese travel agents to better connect with the Australian accommodation market and assist local hoteliers promote their brand to a larger audience from China. Following demand from travel agents in China, Cozitrip developed an intuitive interface to help connect customers, hotels, and travel agents in the Australia market with the aid of AI technology. Cozitrip’s intuitive AI solutions enable one travel agent to do the job of a thousand agents as well as provide improved service efficiency. As of 2017, Cozitrip has been cooperating with Alibaba Cloud as a member of the Startup Program, which provides cloud services and architecture support.

As a new player to the competitive travel market, Cozitrip’s initial challenge was building brand awareness in both Australia and China with the resources that were available. There are also a number of cultural differences between Australia and China in regards to customer and agent expectations. This is reflected in the fact that Chinese agents usually work around the clock and expect instant replies, whereas it’s common for Australian hotels to take up to a day to respond to inquiries. Ping, CEO of Cozitrip explains, “These agents end up calling one hotel after another to figure out if it’s the right one and check availability, which makes it really hard for them to service their clients and market Australia as a destination. Our platform makes this a whole lot easier.” From an online perspective, being accessible by both travel agents and online aggregators was also key to initial success for Cozitrip and one critical barrier to overcome was registering for an ICP Filing, which allows an organization to operate a website hosted in China.

As Cozitrip’s Chief Technology Officer Rinat Sadykov explains, “Alibaba Cloud was a natural fit for Cozitrip when looking to establish and grow the business. Alibaba Cloud has a really solid reputation in China and now with resources and data center offerings in Australia, Hong Kong and Mainland China. It was an easy decision for us to approach and work with their Australian and New Zealand team. Their ability to offer a tailored solution to fit our needs really made them stand out from other providers.”

The initial engagement with Alibaba Cloud proved to be smooth and easy. Cozitrip signed up to the Startup Program Alibaba Cloud was also able to successfully help with the ICP registration process and a number of other critical IP infrastructure support elements that enabled Cozitrip to establish their online business. A proxy in Hong Kong reduced packet dropout significantly and sped up server round trips by 10x. In addition Connecting the Hong Kong and China teams via a direct line will also increase speed in the future and result in reduced latency – ultimately giving a smoother experience for customers.

Rinat feels the future is bright for Cozitrip and highlighted that, “This is a very exciting time for Cozitrip, there is a lot to be done in this market and thankfully we’ve found opportunities to make it happen.” Having just secured new seed funding from investors and cloud support from Alibaba Cloud, Cozitrip is looking to grow the business across Australia and China and showcase their key differentiator in AI technology. Cozitrip will be engaging with local media outlets both in China and Australia and discussing their new AI-driven approach to the industry at a number of IT and business conferences in the future.