Project : Jabama Accommodation (Alibaba Travel)

What it was

Alibaba.ir is Iran’s top online travel agency, with about 40 percent market share and more than 15 million yearly sales. Jabama was Alibaba Travel’s accommodation sub-brand, covering vacation rentals and domestic hotel bookings. I worked on this business at Alibaba Travel Co. in Tehran, Iran, across two roles: Senior Product Manager, Domestic Hotels, from December 2016 to April 2018, then Group Product Line Manager, Accommodation, from April 2018 to February 2020, a total of about three years and two months.

What I led

In the earlier Senior Product Manager, Domestic Hotels role (December 2016 to April 2018), I switched the hotel booking business from offline to online inventory, moving reservations onto an online booking flow. I also introduced customer segmentation for the hotel booking business, which reduced operational expenses.

In the later Group Product Line Manager, Accommodation role (April 2018 to February 2020), I managed Jabama, Alibaba Travel’s accommodation sub-brand, as a whole. I launched vacation rentals as a new line of business under Jabama, alongside the existing domestic hotel bookings. Across this period I worked to improve conversion rates on the accommodation booking flow and to increase gross margins on the accommodation business.

The outcome

The shift from offline to online hotel inventory and the introduction of customer segmentation reduced operational expenses in the domestic hotels business. Under my management of Jabama, vacation rentals launched as a new accommodation category, conversion rates improved, and gross margins increased across the accommodation business at Alibaba Travel, Iran’s top online travel agency by market share and yearly sales.

How it started

I arrived at Alibaba as product manager for domestic hotels and found the whole thing running on phone calls. For an online business, that volume of manual work and its cost made no sense to me.

So I looked at how it is done elsewhere: property management systems inside the hotels, central reservation systems between them. We built the same shape. Once a guest could trust what the list page told them, conversion rose twenty-four percent and look-to-book thirty-two percent in six months.

Then I looked at who our customers actually were, and they were not individuals. They were companies. A corporate reservation platform lifted orders by fifty percent in its first year. That brought far more work into supply and support, so we modernised the back office and took forty percent out of operating cost.

Why bed and breakfasts

Iran had about eight hundred hotels, and no connection to the international market. A small pool.

But every tourist city had thousands of houses that had been rented to travellers for years. Iran has a deep culture of hosting: staying in somebody’s home is old here, not new.

I looked at Airbnb and proposed we move from hotels towards those houses. The company agreed fast and invested heavily, and I was made Accommodation Business Unit Manager.

We built teams across the provinces to help owners with content, photography, getting a house ready to book, and reaching support. We gave them a portal to list a house, upload photos, hold a calendar and set a price.

We took the first booking within hours of putting it on the homepage as a test, before any advertising ran. Then 5,400 houses, around thirty people across product, supply and support, and market leadership in fourteen months.