(Yicai) June 10 -- JD.com is aggressively recruiting highly qualified professionals in the travel and hospitality sectors by offering salaries up to three times the industry norm, as the Chinese e-commerce giant makes a bold move into the tourism industry, another of rival Meituan’s strongholds, following its recent foray into the food delivery market, The Paper reported yesterday.

JD.com is on the hunt for product managers, system architects and airline operations experts and is offering monthly salaries of between CNY50,000 (USD7,000) and CNY70,000 (USD9,744), according to recruitment platform Boss.

Applicants are specifically required to have previous experience at travel giants such as Trip.com and Beijing-based Meituan. Such high salaries are a clear sign that JD.com is making a serious push into the online travel market, industry insiders said.

JD.com has yet to make an official response to the report.

JD.com has recently quietly rolled out a new “lifestyle and travel” section in its app. This includes hotel bookings, air tickets, train tickets and scenic spot tickets. For hotels, the firm is even offering special discounts. For example, a room at a hotel near Taikoo Li in Beijing normally costs CNY370 (USD51.50) a night, but if booked through JD.com, there is a CNY66 subsidy which together with a special ‘first-stay’ discount cuts the price by over CNY80.

JD.com is also tying this new travel service to its food delivery business. A customer can receive a CNY10 (USD1.40) voucher for takeaways when booking a hotel room.

JD.com has actually been involved in travel services for a while, but it has never attracted a lot of attention from the public. The Beijing-based company started offering flight booking services in 2011 and by 2014, it had an official JD Travel channel offering hotel and flight bookings.

Last year, Guo Qing, a former senior vice president at Meituan, joined JD.com. Guo was hired by Meituan in 2014 and was instrumental in growing Meituan’s travel and hotel business over the following seven years.

Since 2022, Meituan has bundled services such as food delivery, instant retail, in-store purchases and travel under a single umbrella called "local life services." This means the firm no longer declares profits for individual sectors. But back in 2021, Meituan's financial report showed that food delivery services had a profit margin of 6.6 percent, while in-store and travel services had a huge 43.3 percent profit margin.

Chairman Richard Liu once said the profit margin on JD.com's takeaway business was less than 5 percent. So JD.com may be using food delivery as a stepping stone into the much more profitable hotel and tourism market as part of its long-term strategy.

JD.com likely sees hotels and tourism as a way to fill a gap in its ecosystem, rather than a core business, said Pan Helin, a member of the information and communication economy expert committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information. For e-commerce platforms, commodity retail has reached its limits and growth is getting harder, he added.

Editor: Kim Taylor