Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tongcheng Travel 2023 second quarter results announcement. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Kylie Yeung. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Welcome to Tongcheng Travel's 2023 second quarter results conference call. I'm Kylie Yeung, Investor Relations Director of the company. Joining us today on the conference call are our Executive Director and CEO, Mr. Heping Ma, our CFO, Mr. Julian Fan, and our VP and Head of Capital Markets, Ms. Joyce Li. For today's call, our management team will provide a review of the company's performance in the second quarter. Hope will brief us on the company's performance in the second quarter. Joyce will discuss our business and operational highlights, and then Julian will address the details of financial performance accordingly. We'll take the questions during the Q&A session that follows. As always, our presentation contains forward-looking statements.
Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market operating conditions, and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the company's actual results, performance or achievement to differ from those in the forward-looking statement. This presentation also contains some unaudited non-IFRS financial measures. They should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for, measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. For a detailed discussion of non-IFRS measures, please refer to our disclosure documents in the IR section of our website. Now, let me introduce our CEO, Hope. Hope, please go ahead.
Thank you, Kylie. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to our earnings call for the second quarter of 2023. 2023 is poised to be an exceptional year for China's travel industry, as the country quickly recovers from the pandemic and and people demonstrate a strong enthusiasm to travel. For the previous quarter, we experienced another phenomenal unleash of travel demand in China. The past Labor Day holiday and Dragon Boat Festival sparked several waves of travel boom throughout the country, and brought, brought, brought more vitalities to the market. We, we, we sustained our robust growth and recovery momentum in all of our business segments. As we leverage, leveraged on our dominant market position and the influence to meet the surging travel demands, demand.
Over the quarter, both our APUs and MPUs once again achieved historic highs with revenue and business volume increase, increasing substantially year-over-year. Back in May, I shared my conviction for 2023. Today, three months later, I would say that I'm really thrilled with the progress we have attained so far, and encouraged by the increasing growth momentum. As we embark on the third quarter, which is traditionally a peak season for the tourism sector, the travel industry is observing a remarkable upwelling as people's passion for the summer travel remains u nabated and exhibits no signs of fading away.
As travel demand in China is evolving and becoming more diversified and dynamic, I'd like to reaffirm our profound faith in China's travel industry, as well as, our company's capabilities to cultivate more substantial business opportunities. For the year ahead, we will persistently pursue our goals of strengthening our core businesses with higher internal efficiency and maintaining industry-leading growth, which are actively exploring additional growth drivers to ensure long-term sustainable development. Moreover, we will dive deeper into the industry and strengthen cooperation with our partners to further solidify our market position. Last but not least, we will endeavor to further refine and enrich our product and service offering to satisfy our users diverse, diversified needs, and provide them with more convenient and joyful journeys.
With that, I will hand over the call to Joyce for more details of our operational highlights in the second quarter. Joyce, please go ahead.
Thank you, Hope. The past quarter was quite fulfilling and rewarding, as we continued to see record highs in our business for a second quarter in a row, with unrestrained travel enthusiasm and strengthened travel demand. Throughout the summer quarter, we acted steadily and precisely to capture users' needs, and further build up our market presence in the travel industry. As usual, we took the lead in industry growth and delivered a superior performance for the second quarter. As for our accommodation business, we remained focused on low-tier cities and continued to step up investments to reinforce our position in the market. Over the last quarter, the business displayed a great prominence and continued to set new highs, both in revenue and volume, with domestic room nights sold registering more than 130% growth compared with the same period in 2019.
Amid the traveling enthusiasm, demand for accommodation further surged, we will act decisively to leverage on user soaring needs. Efforts were increased to explore various occasions for hotel stays, such as stays surrounding music festivals and concerts, which have been trending up since the start of this year. At the same time, we consistently pushed ahead with our cross-sell strategy, we dove deeper into users' underlying preference and needs, and carry out more precise operation and marketing activities. As such, our 15-day cross-selling rate further increased to more than 10% in the past quarter. Moreover, our international hotel business accelerated recovery and improved quarter by quarter in terms of volume. Besides, we continued to develop and offer value-added product service for hotel booking and stays, which also contributed to the growth of business for the past quarter.
Upon the full bloom in the travel industry, our transportation business, which remains the backbone of our revenue and profit, saw new highs both in volume and revenue for the second quarter in a row, thanks to enhanced market shares in the past years. As for the air ticketing business, consistent efforts were made to build a more diversified user profiles, so as to further penetrate the market. Delightfully, our user mix has turned out younger and more diverse. Meanwhile, our international business has improved month by month in the first half of the year, as increased efforts were made to bring more suppliers and user interaction. For the second quarter, our domestic air ticketing volume increased by 40% from 2019 level. As for the train ticketing business, its revenue grew substantially from same period of 2019.
During the festival quarter, we remained focused on enhancing user value and user travel experience. By consistently optimizing our intelligent Huixing system, we provided users with convenience and comfort along their journey. In addition, our bus ticketing business has made concrete progress in enhancing its monetization capability, as well as improving the operational efficiency. Over the last three years, we have extended our footprint on the travel industry and have further enhanced our influence. To have more in the industry, we have built a comprehensive portfolio of hotel brands, ranging from low to high stars. As of the end of June, we had more than 1,000 franchise hotels in operation across the country. Meanwhile, we have also entered the package tour market through acquisition of travel agency companies, which we believe will further expand our territory in the travel industry.
Aiming at growing travel enthusiasm, we seized on the sentiment and further increased engagement with the users at multiple fronts, not only to diversify our traffic sources, but also to expand our user base. During the quarter, we continuously deepened cooperation with Tencent, and furthermore, traffic for its ecosystem in a more effective way. At the same time, we joined hands with WeChat Pay Hong Kong during the quarter, and co-launched a marketing campaign in Hong Kong to reach out to users there. More excitingly, we have reached a strategic partnership with Huawei and have our products and services embedded into ecosystem, through which Huawei users can have easy access to our hotel booking, as well as train and air ticketing service. We believe this cooperation will enable us to have wider reach to users and bring additional growth for us.
Besides, our offline acquisition initiatives continue to play a crucial role in growing our user base, especially the public transit project, which tapped into more cities in the past quarter. The contribution of offline initiatives to MPUs for the second quarter remained meaningful. With such efforts, our user base grew larger in the second quarter, with both MPUs and APUs hitting another high. Our MPU for the quarter exhibit accelerated growth of 62.5% year-over-year, climbing to 42.2 million, setting a new high for the second consecutive quarter. While our MAUs also further increased to 278.9 million for the second quarter, with accelerated growth of 41.1% year-over-year. Our paying ratio was also back to a historical high at around 15%.
Our 12-month rolling paying users as of the end of June, grew to 218 million from 201 million in the first quarter, breaking the historical record in 2022. Over the past three years, we've been endeavoring to build a unique brand image among younger generations through innovative brand campaigns. We were the first OTA to integrate esports and games into our user engagement plan. We were also the first to bring music into travel industry to enrich travel contents. In early July, we cooperated with the Tencent Music and sponsored two grand music festivals in Macau to have our brand highly exposed among younger generations. We also joined hands with a tourist destination in Jiangxi Province and co-hosted a two-day music festival there in later July.
Through music, we sought to further explore the ultimate boundary of travel experience with the younger users and build a fan and entertaining brand personality. This year, enhancing user value has been a key focus for us, and the Black Whale membership program served an important role in this. Vision to target broad travel locations, such as family tours. We joined hands with the Jiangxi Provincial Tourism Bureau and co-launched a digital version that incorporates free access to all tourist attractions and partial entertainment facilities within the province. As of the end of June, the cumulative number of Black Whale members surpassed 13 million. As always, we aspire to empowering the travel industry with our profound internet activities and advanced technology, aiming to build a highly efficient travel ecosystem. Partnership with airports has been our key strategy, and a consistent effort has been made to push ahead with this strategy.
Over the last quarter, we won cooperation with the Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport, through which we will help the airport develop a transit system to attract transit passengers. More meaningfully, we signed a strategic agreement with the Henan Province Airport Group, which owns the hub airport of Zhengzhou International Airport in central China. We will help the airport group develop combined transport solutions, integrating membership program as well as digitalization platform. Besides, we have also built a comprehensive hotel PMS brand metrics to help hotels and alternative accommodations run more efficiently and generate additional revenue. In our corporate value, customer always comes first, and we are fully committed to providing users with a superior travel experience. Our smart questioning system continue to play a vital role in satisfying user travel needs.
During the quarter, we visualized travel solutions of our questioning system with clear product display to provide more convenience to our users. More efforts were made to increase automation in our customer service by handing over standardized queries to AI-driven robots, which should further enhance our customer service efficiency. On top of that, together with third parties, we have been proactively exploring the application of AIGC in our business, which we believe will further increase our operational efficiency. As a leading player in the travel industry, we're determined to contribute to the sustainable development of the travel industry as well as society. Under the backdrop of full day recovery, we launched a training program for tourist professionals of Sichuan Province regarding digital operation and marketing in rural tourism, so as to facilitate the revitalization of rural economy.
The training was part of our Tongcheng Thousand Villages Program, which aims to promote sustainable tourism models in rural China. In June, we also joined hands with more than 200 hotels across the country to provide college entrance families and their parents with a free stationery supplies, water, and shade for rest. On top of that, we were for the first time included in the Sustainability Yearbook China, that is set by S&P Global, in recognition of the strength in our corporation sustainability. Looking ahead, we will remain devoted to activities that contribute to the sustainability of the travel industry as well as of the society. I will stop here and give the call to our CFO, Julian. He will share with you our detailed financial results for the second quarter. Julian, please go ahead.
Thank you, Joyce. Good evening, everyone. Over the past quarter, China's travel industry has undergone a brisk recovery, with casual travel demand being released. People are eager to take part in various forms of travel. We continue to outshine the industry, mainly attributable to our confidence to accommodate different user cohorts and seize opportunities under diverse consumption scenarios, from leisure travel to business travel. We also endeavored to explore various alternatives to create new growth engines for the company. As a result, we achieved admirable growth with our core business blossoming and the new vitality infused for our future enhancement. In the second quarter of 2023, we once again achieved unprecedented levels for both quarterly top line and bottom line.
We reported net revenue of RMB 2.9 billion, representing a 117% year-over-year increase from the same period of 2022, or an 80% year-over-year increase from the same period of 2019. We proactively invested in marketing campaigns and advertisement for the Dragon Boat Festival of 2023, and readied ourselves for the summer traveling season in order to capture market opportunities amid the post-COVID surge in tourism. Thanks to our effective marketing strategies and efficient operations, we achieved a significant improvement in our margin. Our adjusted net margin, net profit, amounted to RMB 592 million, with a 20.7% net margin, compared with 19.5% net margin in quarter one, 2023, and 8.5% net margin in quarter two last year.
Our accommodation reservation business registered robust growth and achieved RMB 1.1 billion for the second quarter of 2023, representing a 94% increase from the same period in 2022, or a 91% increase from the same period of 2019. Our domestic room nights registered more than 130% growth versus 2019. This was largely credited to our effective execution of plans to access the untapped markets and seize opportunities in our advantageous markets in the midst of the industry revival. The strong growth in hotel room nights was also partially attributable to our persistent efforts in executing effective cross-sell strategy to divert more traffic from our transportation business to accommodation business. In the second quarter of 2023, Hotel ADR improved compared with the last year, mainly driven by the rising demand for accommodation reservations.
The blended take rate decreased compared with 2022, mainly because we increased couponing levels to seize marketing opportunities. Transportation ticketing revenue for the second quarter was RMB 1.5 billion, representing a 141% increase compared with the same period of last year, or a 60% increase compared with the same period of 2019. We are once again attaining significant growth with our revenue achieving an all-time high. This was mainly driven by the resurgence of travel enthusiasm across the country and ticketing volume spikes during the second quarter. We also persisted in optimizing our VAS offerings to enhance monetization. For our air ticket business, we strive to penetrate the untapped market and achieved 40% growth in terms of the domestic volume versus 2019's level.
We achieved a remarkable increase from 2019 level in terms of our train ticketing revenue, as we realigned our strategy from volume growth to monetization enhancement in train area. Moreover, we made consistent progress in improving the monetization of our bus ticketing business. In light of the soaring demand for local and short-haul travel post-COVID, we widened the scenario coverage of our car hailing services and achieved exponential growth as well. Other business continued to deliver solid results. The revenue achieved RMB 316 million in the second quarter, representing a growth of 103% year-over-year, or a 215% increase from 2019's level. The surge was attributable to the impressive growth of our Black Whale membership program, as well as the outstanding results in advertisement, corporate travel, and PMS businesses.
Moreover, through development and previous acquisitions, our hotel management business grew rapidly and contributed meaningfully to the revenue of other business. We are now confident that these businesses will maintain their upward trajectory and further boost the company's growth in the future. In terms of the profitability, our gross margin was 75.5% for the second quarter of 2023, increased from 70.9% for the same period of 2022, and 75.0% for the previous quarter. Our efficient operations, intelligent customer service capability, and revenue mix shift, have resulted in a sustained augmentation of our gross margin in the previous quarter.
In the second quarter of 2023, our adjusted EBITDA achieved RMB 806 million, with 28.1% margin, improved from 22.2% year-over-year, and similar with that of previous quarter. Adjusted net profit achieved RMB 592 million. With margin improved to 20.7% from 8.5% in quarter two, 2022, and 19.5% in quarter one this year. The increase in our adjusted net margin was mainly driven by the effective marketing strategies and further leverage in our operations. Service development and administrative expenses in the second quarter of 2023 increased by 38% from the same period of 2022.
Excluding share-based compensation charges, service development and administrative expenses in total accounted for 19.8% of revenue in the second quarter, compared with 28.4% of revenue in the same period of last year, and a 20.3% of revenue in the previous quarter. Selling and marketing expenses in the second quarter of 2023 increased by 93% from the same period of last year. Excluding share-based compensation charges, selling and marketing expenses accounted for 38.4% of revenue in the second quarter, compared with 42.7% of revenue in the same period of 2022, and 37.0% of revenue in the previous quarter. As of June 30, 2023, the balance of cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investment was RMB 8.3 billion.
China's travel market has witnessed a promising rebound and growth for the first half of the year. The past Dragon Boat Festival drew a splendid conclusion for the second quarter and laid the foundation for the continuous flourishing of the travel market in the rest of the year. During the festival, our domestic hotel room nights registered more than 130% growth compared with 2019's level, and our domestic air ticketing volume grew more than 40% over 2019's level. Entering July, we perceived no indication of a recovery deceleration in the travel industry, which demonstrates great resilience and potential. The demand is robust for early summer holidays, with various cohorts such as students, businesses, and family pursuing local and short-haul travel, as well as long-haul tours, which substantially benefits our business.
Recently, the Chinese government published a raft of policies to boost the growth of the travel industry as well as domestic tourism consumption. The strong market rebound is certainly not a flash in the pan, and it will continue into the second half of the year and beyond. Looking ahead, given the strength we have built in our business, we reiterate our confidence in sustaining industry-leading growth and solid profitability, and we are as confident as ever in the long-term growth of the travel industry and our company. We are also dedicated to providing greater value for the society and our stakeholders, including our users, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. With that, operator, we are ready to take questions now. Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We ask each analyst to limit your questions to 2 only. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. This will take a few moments. We will take our first question. The question comes from the line of Brian Gong from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on very solid results. My first question is, can management share a little bit more about our performance, the performance on our platform in the third quarter? What's management's expectation for the upcoming Golden Week in October? I understand that there could be some seasonality for the first quarter. Do you think our strong growth momentum versus 2019 level, this growth momentum can sustain into the fourth quarter and next year? My second question is about margin. Our margin was pretty good in the second quarter, with continuously improving, you know, industry trends. How do we look at our margin outlook in the second half this year? Thank you.
uestions, Brian. Actually, like what we mentioned in the prepared remarks, the Chinese travel industry continued to experience very strong growth during the summer holiday. For example, for air tickets, the CAAC recorded a domestic passenger volume of 59 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 74%, or an increase of 12% when compared with July 2019. That is the ticketing volume of the whole industry. For the railway, the total number of passenger volume nationwide reached 406 million in July, with an average 13 million daily orders for the railway.
representing a year-over-year increase of 81% or an increase of 15% when compared with July 2019. You, you can see that the industry recovery is so strong in July and also in early August. Actually, this shows a significant increase compared with the same period in 2019. For air, the domestic supply has been fully recovered to the 2019 level. Also, maybe you have already observed that the average airfare during the summer holiday remains very high, signifying the strong demand continuing. As stated in our previous remarks, our business performance has once again surpassed the industry recovery rate in the summer vacation.
Our room nights sold in July increased by over 110%, and air ticket volume also increased by over 30% when compared with July 2019. The growing trend continued to be strong, to be very strong in August. After the summer holiday, you know, like what you mentioned, there will be another long holiday for Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day in late September and early October. We believe there will be another wave of strong travel demand there. In fact, after over three years of travel restrictions caused by COVID, we don't think, you know, the pent-up demand can be satisfied only within a few quarters.
If we take other overseas markets, which lifted up travel restrictions earlier as an example, travel demand has continued to be quite strong in the following years. As previously mentioned, we have a strong confidence in the growth of Chinese travel industry for the mid to long term. On the supply side, we anticipate that the ongoing infrastructure improvements, including the development of new airports and expansion of the high-speed train network, will not only enhance travel convenience, but also stimulate domestic travel demand. On demand side, we believe that there are some changes in people's consumption behavior after COVID, leading to a surge in diversified needs.
We have already recognized that people, especially the young generation and elderly people, are more willing to spend on experience instead of the physical goods, which represents a shift or reallocation of the consumption to travel in China right now. With the accelerated growth in experience consumption, we believe the total market, total travel market size, will continue to grow nicely in the following years. We will leverage on our competitive advantages to capture market opportunities brought by these changes. Meanwhile, for our company, we will also enjoy the benefit of increasing the online penetration of travel services, especially in lower-tier cities, lower-tier cities. There is still have some space for the online penetration in lower-tier cities.
On our company's level, we will expand our revenue stream and strive for user value improvement, which will allow us to continue to track the industry growth. For the second half year, the performance and also the margin, actually for Q3, we expect that our performance in all product lines will significantly surpass our 2019 Q3 level. Thanks to the surge in demand, the travel demand and our efficient marketing strategies to capture the market opportunities like what I mentioned. For the full year, we expect that the strong growth we experienced in the first half of 2023 will be continued throughout the rest of the year.
Although it is difficult for us to give concrete guidance because of the booking window of our users are very short, we are highly confident that in the vast potential of Chinese travel industry and our ability to excel and distinguish ourselves in the market. For example, we will continue to develop our mature business, including the accommodation, air tickets and train tickets, leveraging our solid market positions. Regarding our other businesses, we expect our advertising business and Black Whale membership to continue their hyper growth during our huge travel, the traffic and user base. For the new business, we will further develop our hotel management business to accelerate the domestic hotel chain rate and enhance digitalization and service capability in the industry.
Of course, we will explore opportunities in the package tour business and also the outbound travel market as well. For the margin side, we have, you know, we have already optimized our cost structure in the past few years. That is why the adjusted net margin in quarter two is better than expected, because we achieved a better ROI and for sales marketing expenses. As we shared in the previous quarter, we are allocating more marketing resources on existing users to drive more repeated purchase and increase the ARPU. In the coming quarters, as mentioned, we will adhere to our strategic priorities and keep investing on selling and marketing to aggressively capture short-term and long-term growth potential.
Sales marketing investment will be more aggressive than the first half, especially on App Store marketing and Huawei Petal, like Joyce mentioned in our remarks. Meanwhile, we will initiate the pre-installed program with some kind of handset vendors, for example, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, et cetera. It is one of our strategies to diversify our channel, but the return from this program may take, like, one to two quarters to be reflected. Last, for the margin side, we believe that our net margin will be relatively stable in quarter three, compared with the first half of 2023. Although we will increase our sales marketing dollars investment, but actually our operation leverage will enhance, further enhance in quarter three because of the revenue scale going up.
Net margin in quarter four will slightly drop quarter-over-quarter due to seasonality, because we need to invest more to prepare for the coming Spring Festival. Definitely, the margin in quarter four will improve from the same period in both 2019 and 2022. Thank you. That is what I will share. Thank you for the question.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Janet Yang from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you, management, for taking my question. Congratulations, Ma Heping, Julian, and Joyce, on the impressive results. I have two questions related to user behavior. First, could you please share a bit about if recently there are some user behavior trends or patterns that's worth highlighting? For example, it can be about customer retention, repurchase frequency, general preference in travel destination, booking window, or the average order value, et cetera. Secondly, there has been quite some news around the consumption downgrade and frugal style of traveling. Just wonder, how do you think about the implications of such consumption environment on our business and strategy going forward?
Thank you, Janet, for your questions. I think I'll first answer the second questions, and Julian will provide more colors on the user behavior change. As we can all know, that since reopening, the Chinese travel industry have experienced a remarkable rebound. You can see both hotel room rate and airfare price have been significant surges. Despite this, people's enthusiasm for travel remains exceptionally strong, and this trend has been continued throughout the first half of the year and up to now. As Julian mentioned, we still see the strong momentum continuing into the third quarter. We think that this blooming demand has proven the resilience and the vitality of the Chinese travel industry, we can see the consumer continue to prioritize the spending on travel and experience.
We also believe that there are more diversified travel needs that create additional opportunity to industry. For example, as I mentioned, it is now very popular for the younger generation to make travel or hotel stays related to the music festivals and concerts, e-sports event, et cetera. In the past, I think spending on hotel only consists a very small part of the total retail sales in China. That's why a small shift of the consumer spending from physical goods to travel will bring meaningful growth momentum to the travel industry. Additionally, I think the Chinese government has displayed a strong dedication to support the travel industry. Recently, more efforts were made to promote domestic tourism, so as to drive the overall economic development, and the travel sector will definitely benefit from this. We remain very confident in the long-term upward trajectory of China's travel industry.
We will continue to browse our core competitive advantages, focusing on enhancing our execution capability, product and service offerings, and brand influence to ensure our sustainable growth.
In terms of the behavior and the frequency, you know, for this year, we observed that the demand is mixed. There's a lot of mixed demand among the long haul, the short haul, and the vacation. You know, long haul happened in the summer vacation and the Labor Day, and there's a lot of short haul travels surrounding their cities in the weekends and also in the Qingming and also the Dragon Boat Festival. Also there's a lot of vacations in some kind of... For example, the Valentine's Day, the Chinese Valentine's Day, in the last week, we have reached another historical high for our room night in the last weekend because of the, there's a Chinese Valentine's Day.
Nowadays, the demand actually is really mixed, so the frequency, the frequency of our users has increased a lot in the past 12 months. In the past 12 months, the frequency per users have already reached 6.6 times for each users. It has already increased, like, 50% compared with 2019 and 2021. We don't mention 2020 and 2022 because of the impact of the COVID. Actually that is our strategic priorities this year. We don't mention too much about the user volume growth, but we mention a lot of times about the frequency and user value growth.
That is our strategic priority, to enhance our user value, rather than solely pursuing user growth, as we have already got a substantial base of paying users. For example, as we mentioned, we would like to invest more promotions on our existing users and to drive improvement in frequency and output this year. For example, we will persist in investing in targeted promotions and improving our ability to provide precise recommendations to our users, thereby enhancing the cross-selling from our transportation business to accommodation business. This should lead to higher revenue per order and better take rate for our overall company business. The second one is we aim to further engage with users who were previously acquired from offline scenarios, such as those who will use hotel QR code scanning or smart bus ticketing equipment.
To achieve this, we plan to optimize our sales and marketing strategies by offering targeted promotions that motivate these users to make direct online purchases. Also, we continue to invest in promoting our VAS product and services that are tailored to our users' travel needs. For instance, we will continue to encourage the user to use our Huixing system, which offers intelligent travel solutions to our user while generating revenue for us. We will also launch new promotions for our innovative product and services in different scenarios to enhance our user value. Furthermore, we upgraded our membership program and also further delved into the potential value of different users.
We also continue to promote our Black Whale membership program to foster greater loyalty among our user base, leading to an increase in our overall ARPU and purchase frequency. Thank you. That is what we would like to share. Thank you for the question.
Thank you. Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Simon Cheung from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I got 3 questions. Just on your revenue momentum between the transportation and the accommodations segment, I have been tracking and seeing that, you know, accommodation obviously has continued to outperform. From I think before COVID, there was like half of the transportation revenue from the accommodations, to now pretty much almost even, you know, 50/50. Obviously, that might be, you know, your point about monetization and stuff. Perhaps you can, you know, share with us, you know, how, how should we think about, you know, the trajectory of these two separate business going forward? That's, and especially on the back of Douyin, obviously still talking about, you know, coming into the one of the segments.
That's the first questions. Then the second question, just on business travel. You know, we, we've been hearing a lot of very, a lot of positivity from your, as well as a lot of travel company talking about how leisure travel has been holding up very well during the summer season. That's well understood, but I think the markets are generally a bit concerned about the slowdown in business travel, PMI numbers and all those. Wondering if you can share with us, you know, some of the highlight there. Then lastly, I think, you also make an announcement that you have strike another agreements to have, like, a service provider agreement with, with some hotel management company or accommodation supplier on a related transaction basis.
Can you elaborate a bit more on that and whether Ma Heping would have other business that, you know, there may be further cooperative opportunities further down the road? Thank you.
Okay, thank you for the questions. First, I would like to provide some colors on our business development for the accommodation and also for the transportation. First, for the accommodation, , well, we are very honored to say that we have penetrated a lot of market share in the past 3 years for the hotel market share. Our market share actually in the online and also in the total market, has increased a lot compared with 2019. Also the growth is better than the transportation side, because there's 3 reasons for the hotel side. The first one, you know, the online penetration on the hotel side is relatively lower in 3 years ago. It's just like 25%.
You know, for the transportation, one, the online penetration it has been very mature. Three years ago, it's like 75%-80%. In the past three years, the main things that we developed is to push the online penetration for the accommodation side, especially in the low-tier cities. You know, low-tier city and the mid to low-end hotels just have like 20% or even 10% of the online penetration. We captured a lot of market share from these areas. We use a lot of user acquisition methods in front of the hotel front. We think we are very successful in this area. Nowadays, we believe the hotel online penetration has already increased up to 35%, from 25% to 35%.
In terms of the, those, 10% that increase, we think we catch the majority of them. The second one is the online kind of traffic, online, cross-sell, cross-sell strategies that, that we measure a lot of times. Cross-sell from the transportation to accommodation. That is because, you know, for the traffic-wise, our transportation traffic is like 3 to 4 times on the more than our accommodation traffic. Naturally, that the for the for the company, we will use, we will double use the traffic that we acquired from the transportation. In the past, 3 years, we do a lot of things, do a lot of programs on the cross-sell from transportation to accommodation.
That is why the accommodation growth is better than our transportation as well. In the past three years, we created a lot of VAS products and services on the accommodation side. For example, the insurance and also the hotel consumable goods, and also the membership card that we purchase for the accommodation room nights as well. That is why we enjoy the very hyper growth on the accommodation side in the past three years. For the transportation. For our transportation, the air and the train, the revenue growth is far more better than the industry, but slightly lower than the accommodation side. That is also means we acquired the market share in this area.
Uh, that is major because, uh, you know, there's a lot of, uh, uh, airports, uh, in the second tier and third tier cities. So we have a lot of market campaigns around these, uh, cities, around the, uh, their, uh, the, the, the, the airports. For example, the, uh, Chengdu Airport and also the Chongqing Airport. Uh, and also, uh, the customers, uh, around those airports is more like, uh, uh... The, the behaviors are more like our, uh, is proper, uh, uh, for our platform. So in the past, uh, three years, uh, we catch a lot of, uh, uh, users, acquire a lot of users in this area. So that is why we also increase our market, uh, market share in, uh, air and also in train, uh, areas in the past, uh, three years.
Also for the business travel that, you asked, you know, the business travel, actually for the whole China market, is still in a very early stage. Actually, there's only, I think 10% or less than 10% of the companies will use the TMC, the business travel system. For example, our company, Tongcheng, also like Trip.com company, travels. There's a lot of space that we could develop in the future, especially for the SMB companies in mainland China.
This year, actually, our business travel segment also enjoys very high growth, because after the COVID, the past three years COVID, you know, a lot of companies would like to save their budget on the traveling and also on the expenses management. They are more willing to use the tools to help them to build a system and help them to manage the business travel for those companies. That is what I would like to share on each segment. The third question is about the...
the rate.
The hotel management.
Before that, I think I can provide more colors on the competition landscape right now, as you mentioned. Still currently, we see the market competition is very healthy and stable. Although we do have gradually increased operating level in certain markets, as Julian has mentioned, our take rate is still quite healthy. We will ensure that our product and service remain competitive in the market by utilizing our flexible cost structure, light operational model, and dynamic pricing strategies. We believe that the fierce price war will not be necessary, as our market position and user base are clearly differentiated. Through our strategic approach to expand into the lower tier cities, and the consistent effort have been made in recent years, we have successfully established a strong foothold and a competitive advantage in this region.
This lower tier cities still has a relatively low online penetration, as Julian has mentioned, so we're quite strong confident for our accommodation business to grow in this market. In terms of the short video platforms, as you have been mentioned, I think as a leading OTA, we have a wealth of industry resources and strong relationships with our suppliers that take time for new entrants to build. For the hotel supply, efficient management systems and effective communication with hotels are very essential due to fluctuating price, limited room capacity and other effects. We have the long history of accumulation in industry resources and close bonding with our suppliers, as we always emphasize on enhancing value proposition to our guests. This has been one of our great advantages over the new entrants.
Secondly, the purchase of travel product service are typically relatively low frequency and have longer and more complicated decision-making process. Conversion of users from content to paying customers can be challenging, require in-depth knowledge of users to efficiently convert them to paying users. We have been successful achieving this over these years. Lastly, as an OTA, we focus on providing high-quality service and exceptional user experience, which are also very crucial for travel users. We have our own products and services, and continue to innovate new value-added product services based on our understanding of the market and involving the user needs. Our customer service team is also dedicated to serving our users efficiently. That is the our view in terms of the competitive landscape.
The last question is concerning about the related transactions with several hotel groups we acquired during the past few years. We did it through acquisition and investment, as well as internal incubation and organic growth. We have established now 8 major hotel brands. As of June 30, 2023, our investing companies are managing and operating nearly 1,000 franchise hotels. They have been crossing, like 30 provinces and have signed contracts over 500 hotels. We think that hotel chain management market is huge in China, given the low hotel chain rate when compared with the market in foreign countries. We also like to be actively involved in the upgrade for this industry, into collaborating on OTAs strength to enhance efficiency of the industry.
With the investment in hotel chain company, we can better utilize our membership program for higher stickiness and retention. Meanwhile, we could also share the benefits with the hotels and offer superior service to our users. Besides, the hotel chain is a very important offline user acquisition channels for the company, as we have been devoted to the offline acquisition channels for several years. It's also very useful as to accelerate the online penetration in low-tier cities. Going forward, we would like to steadily develop this business and plan to run the business mainly by franchise model, pursuing synergy and mutual benefits with the hotels. Thank you.
Great. , great. Thanks a lot, Julian and, and, Joyce. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Kylie Yeung for closing remarks.
Thank you. We're closing the call now. If you wish to check out our presentation and other financial information, please visit the IR section of our company website. Thank you, and see you next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.