What is Traveloka? Traveloka Review

Traveloka is an Indonesian unicorn company and a leading travel company in Southeast Asia, providing online flight and hotel booking services for travel. Traveloka has recently expanded into providing lifestyle products and services such as attraction tickets, activities, car rentals and restaurant coupons.

About Traveloka

Traveloka operates in six countries in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore.

Traveloka works with more than 100 domestic and international airlines, providing services for more than 200,000 routes worldwide. Traveloka also offers different accommodation booking options, including hotels, apartments, guesthouses, homestays, villas and resorts. In addition, Traveloka offers a variety of payment methods for different countries, such as Maybank2u, CIMB Clicks, HSBC, PBe and HongLeong Connect. Travelok is also ready to provide customers with 24-hour customer service in local languages.

As of February 2019, Traveloka stated that its mobile app had been downloaded over 30 million times, making it the most popular mobile app in Southeast Asia.

Background

Founder Ferry Unardi was born in Padang, Indonesia in 1988. After graduating from high school, he went to Purdue University in the United States to study computer science and engineering. After graduating from university, Ferry Unardi joined Microsoft in Seattle, USA. While working at Microsoft, Ferry Unardi met two future co-founders of Traveloka, Albert Zhang and Derianto Kusuma.

After three years of work, Ferry Unardi encountered a bottleneck in his career. In order to find a breakthrough, Ferry Unardi once flew to China to find the answer. The result of his thinking was tourism and aviation. Later, in order to supplement his knowledge in more aspects, he started to study at Harvard MBA Business School. During his study, Ferry Unardi often traveled between the United States and Indonesia to investigate the market. In Indonesia, Ferry Unardi deeply felt the difficulty of air ticket booking, and also saw the gap in the market and huge business opportunities.

In 2012, Ferry Unardi began to notice the booming trend of online ticketing startups and thought that the time was right. So Ferry Unardi, Derianto Kusuma and Albert Zhang founded Traveloka. In 2013, founders KawalPemilu.org and Ainun Najib joined them.

Development History

- In 2012, Traveloka was founded. Initially, Traveloka only had the functions of flight inquiry and price comparison. In mid-2013, Traveloka transformed into an online flight booking website, where users can place orders on its official website.

-In November 2012, Traveloka received seed funding from East Ventures just a few months after its launch.

-In September 2013, Traveloka received a Series A investment from Global Founders CAPItal (co-founded by the Samwer brothers of Rocket Internet).

- In March 2014, Ferry Unardi said that Traveloka would soon enter the hotel room booking business. In July 2014, hotel booking services were sold on the Traveloka website for the first time.

-Starting in 2015, Traveloka began to enter other Southeast Asian countries in a planned manner, opening regional offices in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, with more than a thousand employees.

-In November 2015, Traveloka had 3.7 million desktop users.

-From January to October 2016, the number of visits to Traveloka's website reached 93.38 million, with a similar ratio between PC and mobile terminals, and a bounce rate of 33.41%.

-On January 1, 2017, East Ventures, Beijing JD Financial Technology Holding Co., Ltd., Sequoia Capital (Overseas), and Hillhouse Capital Management Co., Ltd. invested US$150 million in Traveloka.

-In May 2017, Traveloka launched car rental, Traveloka eats dining and PayLater lending features.

-In July 2017, Southeast Asian online travel company Traveloka received US$350 million in financing from Expedia.

- In October 2018, Traveloka is launching a new round of financing worth US$400 million. This round of financing will be led by Singapore's sovereign fund GIC and will be mainly used to develop ticket booking services for tourists' air tickets, hotels, concerts, amusement parks and other activities.

-In January 2019, Traveloka opened a research and development (R&D) center in Bengaluru.