Throughout the ages, it has always been a long-cherished aspiration to visitall the mountains and rivers. Thanks to the continuous development of the transportation technology, it’s never been a difficulty to initiate “a trip as decided instantaneously”, and the tourism has gradually become a daily entertainment and leisure mode. Talking about the online travel, the slogan: “To travel, find Tuniu” is prevailing; and the enterprise practicing this slogan has now become the leader in the online recreational tourism industry – Tuniu.com.
In retrospect of the development of Tuniu.com which has undergone vicissitudes, Yu Dunde, the founder and outstanding alumnus of Southeast University, is of no doubt the protagonist of this story. At the beginning of the establishment of Tuniu, the online travel industry has been heavily involved in the competition of standard products market such as ticket and hotel, etc.. The team under the leadership of Yu Dunde has finally established its foothold in the online leisure travel market and stepped out of its own world. The entrepreneurial story about this “cow man” has long been known.
How did he firmly follow the road to entrepreneurship in a step by step manner? This is a hard and brilliant story.
The newborn calf started from an internet Dunde. In 2003, he graduated from the Mathematics Department of Southeast University with a Bachelor's Degree. Such undergraduate study experience with great difference from his follow-up entrepreneurship just foreshadowed his entrepreneurial journey several years later.
Yu Dunde expressed frankly that his entrepreneurship in the Internet field was inseparable from the learning and development environment in Southeast University, when the internet was not popular; but the students were allowed to access internet in Southeast University, where the internet was accessible at the library in Sipailou Campus. During his study period, Yu Dunde who was studying at Pukou Campus far away was unsatisfied with his professional studies, but actively acquainted himself with internet as a new thing. At each weekend, Yu Dunde always took the bus to the main campus for internet access. Despite of long queue, the demand of internet access ticket and relatively few portals such as ChinaRen, etc., he was accessible to the internet content, technology and ideas early, which have greatly expanded his field of vision. Based on his initial knowledge and learning of the internet, Yu Dunde started to apply his basic internet technology and programming principles to design some personal homepages. The so-called “unintentional positive explorations” have thus brought about great assistance to his later work on internet technology research and development as well as internet entrepreneurship.
Interest functions as the best teacher. Yu Dunde, with his enthusiasm of internet technology, consciously integrated theintramural and extramural resources, his learning and practice to take the first step toward society by virtue of social practice. During the summer vocation of 1999, he and his classmate designed a webpage for a company at Pukou. By virtue of his knowledge and skills acquired in the old library of the main campus, they finally realized the expected webpage functions by programing. Although the practice project was small in scale, he’s achieved far more than the remuneration, the deepened understanding of the internet technology and the customer’s demands.
In 2001, Yu Dunde returned to the main campus at Sipailou after two years’ study at Pukou. Upon the introduction of Chu Xubin from the Mechanical Department, he joined in the campus’ “Herald Net” to further accumulate his internet skills. On the one hand, Yu Dunde released relevant information about the school; on the other hand, provided a platform for students to communicate online. During this period, he had not only been greatly guided by teachers Pei Feng and Li Zhen, but met many classmates with common interests. In addition to the teacher's teachings at class, the students learnt from each other, encouraged and inspired each other; therefore, the entire “Herald Net” was surrounded by a positive atmosphere. Many years later, many people who were working for “Herald Net” have become the executives and backbones of Tuniu Company.
Yu Dunde’s “professional figure” was greatly recognized by a shirt, a pair of leather shoes, a handbag under his arm, fast walking with habitual lowered head in the tranquil campus from Pukou Campus to Sipailou Campus. He devoted his full attention to learning internet technology without concerning the landscape around. In the eyes of everyone, Yu Dunde was a completely “technical madman”. He was not technically partial at all. When the trendy .Net just becamepopular, he had been already highly proficient and even adept at LAMP technology, which was rarely accessed by the college students.
Looking back on his career, Yu Dunde was deeply touched: surfing on the net in the old library , practice during the summer vocation and work at “Herald Net”. Southeast University has provided thepractice opportunities in a multi-perspective and deep manner, enabling him to combine his own learning with practice, summarize and guide practice through theoretical learning, and digest and improve knowledge accumulation through practice. All of these precious experience has thus constituted his most memorable memories of college days and also exerted decisive influences on his later engagement in startup and independent partnership entrepreneurship.
After graduation in 2003, Yu Dunde became a software engineer and participated in the startups such as Zhichang Technology, Blog China and Ci123.com, etc.. In 2006, he founded Tuniu.com. In the course of his engagement in startups and independent entrepreneurship, he has been always keeping in his mind the school motto of “Striving for Perfection”, which is always inspiring him to maintain great efforts.
During his service for Zhichang Technology, Yu Dunde was responsible for developing a project management software for PDA equipment. At that time, PDA greatly differed from the mobile phone for low frequency, small screen and low resolution. In order to achieve excellent operation results, it was necessary to simplify the codes as much as possible to maximize the hardware performance while rendering each pixel on the screen repeatedly.
Blog China was an internet company that provided blog services. It was the first truly internet company that Yu Dunde joined in. The initial stage of this startup witnessed the rapid rise of Web 2.0 in the global internet field, which highlighted soaring traffic of blog services. Yu Dunde, serving as the technical director, usually worked overtime to the mid night. If he could not return to his domicile before 12pm when the elevator was closed, he had to climb the 14-storey staircases back home after exhausting work. At that time, Yu Dunde was a workaholic in the eyes of his colleagues. He worked 14 hours a day and seven days a week.
When talking about the understanding of “Striving for Perfection”, Yu Dunde believed that it should be “the spirit of craftsman”, focusing on “concentration” and “perfection”. No matter in terms of the service industry or the manufacturing industry, we must strive for excellence and pursue perfection, which also represents the spiritual value of the internet industry in which we live. For his college days, the teachers’ and alumni’s striving for academic excellence and seeking for vigor in terms of technology and practice in Southeast University have impressed him a lot; therefore, after he started his own business, he was aware of the significance of practice. Such concept has also profoundly affected his colleagues. Thanks to his ultimate pursuit of perfection, his colleagues joked that he “worked in an extremely serious manner”. As he’s always been rigorous with himself and the project as well, the concept of “perfection” has been naturally integrated into the team atmosphere and corporate culture. In the company’s five core values, namely, “Customer-oriented, Integrity, Simplicity, Perfection and Sharing”, “Perfection” is exactly one of the key points.
As far as Yu Dunde is concerned, “Perfection” never refers to the self-discipline ina day but the accumulated focus on details over the years. In the past over decade since the establishment of Tuniu Company, Yu Dunde has been persisting in viewing the user’s complaints every day with the accumulated complaints beyond 100,000 in quantity. By browsing the comments and suggestions proposed by the customers after the trip, he accepted the customers’ criticism and monitoring to continuously improve and upgrade the customer’s services. He’s finally fulfilled his concept: the ultimate pursuit of details shall represent the most important responsibility for the customers. Under the continuous efforts in expanding the industrial chain vertically, the current Tuniu Company has long been no longer limited to providing online reservations at the place of departure, but set up self-supporting service organizations and tour guides, etc. at destinations to guarantee the customers’ safety during the trip and thus achieve quality services from the source.
In the eyes of Yu Dunde, “Striving for Perfection” has never been the simple mechanical repetition, but requires constant questioning and self-denial, constant divergence and convergence, and constant summarization and practice. In respect of questioning and denial, on the one hand, we have to maintain creativity and vitality, constantly think and question the current work; on the other hand, we demand rational analysis to screen out the essence and fight for it. In respect of divergence and convergence, we must be able of wide imagination in reference to historic experience and experience in other fields; on the other hand, in combination of actual conditions, we’d better abandon opportunities with low probability while focusing on key breakthroughs. This is a painful but happy process of self-growth. Only with the continuous expansion of frequency, scope, depth and time span from these three perspectives, can we approach the objective of “Striving for Perfection” closer and closer.
The company attributes its leadership to concentration. “I think that we made right decisions in the early stage, which has laid down the foundation for the current development.”, as summarized by Yu Dunde in retrospect of the company’s development history.
At the beginning of incubation of Tuniu, Yu Dunde and his team had definite intention of entrepreneurship: to make travel easier. At that time, Ctrip and Elong had already taken up a steady place in the online travel market by providing perfect services of air ticket and hotel reservation from offline to online. The seemingly difficult leisure travel industry online was unveiled by Yu Dunde. He judged that the leisure tourism would be a major trend with upgraded consumption domestically. Based on the differentiated positioning, it can just give a full play to his advantages by continuously ploughing its internet technology in this vertical field.
In adherence to the concept of “to make travel easier”, the great “doer” took the initiative to study the tourist attractions of the community in the direction of leisure tourism. At that time, the definite profit point of the community model had not been unveiled. In 2007, Yu Dunde and his team started the first transformation and Tuniu had already created the bookings of about RMB 10 million for the cooperating travel agencies within less than a year. Nevertheless, with the increasing volume of orders, new problems popped out: the offline travel agencies had no time to concern the online customers due to busy business offline, which thus resulted in poor experience online. At this moment, Yu Dunde realized that the problem of customer service cannot be solved fundamentally by simply providing online services. In this sense, Tuniu shall no longer rely on the offline travel agencies completely, but take the responsibility for serving customers at the meantime.
Therefore, Yu Dunde changed the original platform mode to the “Internet + Call Center + Implementation” mode. The earliest Tuniu had no call center, the customer service department only had 10 calls on two tables with 5 people arranged on each side. Later, Yu Dunde spent tens of thousands yuan to set up an open source system and a simple call center. “The equipment at that time was quite outdated, the system hardware was unstable with echoes and the disconnection was likely to happen.” Although the initial effect was far from satisfaction, the call center had “complete” preassigned pattern. In 2008, the struggling survival year of many start-ups, Tuniu ushered the first financing of millions dollars invested by Jiang Tao from GOBI Partners and finally had money to upgrade its call center, which was then followed by significantly rising conversion rate as brought about by the optimization of its customer services.
“We decided to focus on leisure travel at that time. Although we encountered many temptations and challenges, we finally persisted. In retrospect, the vision is very important. The company made right decisions on major issues. Many peers changed in the entrepreneurial process instead of focusing on one objective, which thus caused painful result.” Sticking to the initial intension, based on differentiated positioning, paying attention to services, digging into retail and refining the process, Yu Dunde and his Tuniu have gradually developed to the leader in online leisure tourism industry.
On May 9, 2014, Tuniu was successfully listed on NASDAQ. In his eyes, this was neither a chance of breathing nor an end, but a new starting point. The mission of “to make travel easier” is far from realization. The philosophy of “concentration” and “perfection” has never been a empty talk. You can hear it from the school motto of Southeast University, from Tuniu’s advertisement of “To travel, find Tuniu”, from Nasdaq’s bell, and from the customers’ sound feedback…
Profile of the alumnus:
Yu Dunde, born in 1981, native of Jimo City, Shandong Province, was awarded the Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics by Southeast University. He founded Tuniu.com in 2006 and is now serving CEO of Tuniu.com. He has been granted such titles as “Entrepreneurial Star of Nanjing City”, “S&T Entrepreneurial Mentor of Jiangsu Province”, “Top 10 Excellent Youth of Jiangsu Province” and “Top 10 Most Influential Person of China in 2014”, etc. in succession. Key entrepreneurial words: striving for perfection, concentration on tourism and emphasis on service.
The enterprise’s name card:
Tuniu, a Chinese Internet company focusing on online leisure tourism market in the field of “Internet + Tourism”. Founded in 2006 in Nanjing with the mission of “to make travel easier” and “a world-class company starting from tourism”, it’s providing tourism services from 420 cities, basically covering the world’s top destination countries and regions. As of August 2018, Tuniu.com has set up more than 300 offline stores in cities across the country, which can provide more than 2 million quality products and has accumulatively arranged trips for more than 99 million people. An accumulative 5.7 millions comments have been received from the customers with the users’ comprehensive satisfaction up to 95%. (Zhu Meng, Wang Yani)
Originally published on “Journal of Southeast University”, Issue 1379, Version 5
