DirectBooking Technology (NASDAQ:ZDAI) ("DirectBooking" or the "Company") today announced that it has entered into a strategic joint venture agreement with Beijing DeepYou Digital Technology Co., Ltd. ("DeepYou"). Under the agreement, DirectBooking will hold a 51% equity interest in the joint venture and DeepYou will hold 49%. DeepYou was founded by former JD.com Senior Vice President Mr. Li Daxue. The two parties will jointly establish a new technology company to build China’s first natively Agent-to-Agent, fully integrated travel-and-stay next-generation AI direct-booking platform for the hospitality sector. The platform will provide robotic staff solutions for hospitality enterprises on the enterprise side and robotic assistant services for users on the consumer side. The new company will be chaired and led by Mr. Li Daxue, who will bring top-tier technological vision and strategic insight to the business. Mr. Li’s participation will provide top-level strategic guidance and core technological enablement for the project, helping ensure that it reaches a leading position in the industry in terms of AI technology applications and business model innovation.

Targeting a Trillion-Yuan Market and Transforming the Traditional OTA Model

China’s travel and hospitality market is currently in a golden phase of structural growth. According to data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, domestic tourist trips in 2024 reached 5.615 billion, up 14.8% year over year, while total tourism revenue exceeded RMB 5.75 trillion, an increase of 17.1% year over year and a record high. However, the industry has long faced structural pain points including supply-demand mismatches, high commissions and fragmented user experiences. Traditional online travel agency (OTA) platforms typically charge merchants commissions of 15% to 25%, severely squeezing hotel profit margins. At the same time, consumers must switch between multiple platforms to carry out complex tasks such as "buying tickets, booking rooms and finding activities," resulting in a highly fragmented service experience.

This project is designed to precisely address these pain points through an innovative closed-loop business model that combines "scenic-spot ticketing for customer acquisition, embedded consumer Agents to capture demand in advance, OpenClaw Agents to integrate fragmented supply, large AI models for intelligent matching, and a nationwide network of city-level agents for local fulfillment." By using AI Agent technology to enable decentralized, direct connections between supply and demand, the platform aims to significantly reduce transaction costs and reset efficiency benchmarks for the industry.