KLM Royal Dutch Airlines becomes the first non- Chinese airline company to accept the WeChat Pay to buy the airfare.
In last few days, this Dutch airline estimated around 20 to 30 percent of its Chinese customers used WeChat Pay for their airfare, preferring a payment platform embedded into China’s top social media site over more traditional options.
The Chinese consumers mainly use WeChat Pay mainly for the payment of air travels or any payments for the products, so they didn’t need to be told about KLM’s new functionality.
Karlijn Vogel-Meijer, who directs the KLM’s social media strategy, said that the way Chinese do business, and the way the Chinese use online and social tools is something the world can learn a lot from.
KLM is hoping that this decision can hugely encourage the demand to buy the flights tickets from Shanghai and Beijing to Amsterdam.
Adding WeChat Pay will be a good bet which is considering almost one billion people use WeChat’s messaging tool each month, and roughly 600 million have enabled the payment function, allowing them to buy goods, including airfare, through WeChat.
WeChat in general gives platform to the people of China a completely integrated payment app and for this is very logical to allow the customers to pay the flight fares in most preferred way.
Alipay almost controls about 54 percent of the Chinese third-party mobile payment market, while TenPay, another payment app has the 40% of the market. As recently as 2014, Alipay controlled about 80 percent of this market.
Alipay has a major edge with airlines. There are several non-Chinese airlines in Asia, including including Air Asia, Scoot, and Philippine Airlines, accept it, as do a handful of carriers in the United States and Europe.
American airlines companies like United Airlines and Delta Air Lines takes on Alipay, while in Europe, Finnair accepts it.
