The combined company Wildberries & Russ (RWB) has brought WB Travel into a separate business travel business. The tour operator FUN&SUN became a partner of the project. The announcement was made at the KIT conference in Moscow, where the company showed how it plans to simplify business trips for corporate clients and its own audience of sellers.
At the start, the service closes the most frequent tasks of business trips: booking and paying for hotels and flights on an invoice, including access to tour operator rates. According to the company, trips can be arranged in Russia and foreign destinations, support is promised 24/7, registration is available online.
A special emphasis is placed on the sellers of the marketplace. Special conditions have been announced for them: zero service fee when booking hotels, a separate service fee for air tickets and subscription discounts. This looks like an attempt to reduce the "hidden cost" of business trips for small and medium-sized businesses that keep sales on site and regularly travel to warehouses, factories, partners and exhibitions.
The key quote from the head of RWB sets the logic of the product and the target audience:
"The launch of the business trip service takes the implementation of the strategic partnership between Wildberries and FUN&SUN to a new level. This is a promising market that is actively digitizing, and combining the expertise of our companies in technology and tourism creates additional value for customers. At the same time, it is important to us that within the framework of this product we can support more than 1 million of our sellers by providing them with exclusive business travel rates."
Next, the WB Travel team plans to expand the functionality: add train tickets, increase the number of payment methods, and launch additional options for trip management. For the market, this is a signal that marketplaces are increasingly moving into B2B services around trade: finance, logistics, document management, and now business trips as a regular expense item for entrepreneurs.
