Shinsegae Duty Free said on the 5th that it signed a strategic memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Fliggy, an online travel service platform under Alibaba Group, to strengthen shopping benefits for tourists visiting Korea.
Fliggy is Alibaba's online travel platform established in 2016. It offers more than 25,000 domestic and international air routes in China, partnership products with over 1.5 million hotels worldwide, and more than 8,000 theme park and tourist attraction products. It targets Alibaba's premium paid membership "88VIP" (about 56 million members) as its core customer base.
Shinsegae Duty Free plans to maximize the first-mover effect with Chinese tourists through its collaboration with Fliggy and speed up the expansion of its global customer base. Buoyed by the recent K-culture boom, Korea is emerging as a key tourist destination in Asia, and demand from individual Chinese tourists visiting Korea (FIT) is showing a clear recovery trend.
Shinsegae Duty Free plans to offer tiered memberships and exclusive shopping benefits to Fliggy and 88VIP members. By providing customized messages for each stage of the journey, it will allow Fliggy customers to conveniently check and use various duty-free benefits from "before the trip–during the visit to Korea–after returning home."
In addition, it plans not to limit the partnership to Fliggy as a single platform but to consider linkage possibilities with corporations under Alibaba. A Shinsegae Duty Free official added, "We plan to continue expanding touchpoints with global customers by linking Alibaba's digital ecosystem in the future."