JD.com has entered the travel business with guns blazing. They're offering hotels zero commission for three years and Richard Liu says he's willing to lose money for years to win. If you want to see what happens when JD decides to compete irrationally, look at food delivery. Meituan's operating margins just collapsed from 14% to 0.4% defending against them. In China, food delivery is a low margin business that's used to attract traffic to monetize them with higher margins business, and in this case—travels. Trip already lost domestic dominance to Meituan once. Now they're facing another formid...
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