First of all, Happy Holiday!
Last week, we talked about the helpful apps that make you a smarter traveler. Today, we will extend the topic a little bit by looking deeper into a remarkable startup tech company in Southeast Asia that specialized in the travel industry.
When I was traveling back to Malaysia last January, walking through the never-ending corridor in KLIA2, something caught my attention.
There were beautiful photos that trigger your travel desire shown everywhere in KLIA2, with the trademark of Traveloka. While waiting for my baggage at the carousel, I quickly googled about Traveloka then only I discovered it was a rising star among Internet Booking Engines (IBE).
What attracted my interest toward Traveloka is they became the No. 1 Flight Cheap Ticket & Hotel Booking Service in Indonesia in 2013 (according to comScore’s research), which was after only a year they launched the service! They are expanding rapidly within Southeast Asia, operating in 6 countries and having more than thousands of employees across SEA.
So, what are the uniqueness about Traveloka that made them stand out from all other competitors in the same industry?
Fast & Convenient Booking
This is the reason for the co-founders to build the company. They realized that the process of searching the best route and purchasing the flight ticket was complicated, thus they take the initiative to develop a Traveloka to solve travelers’ problems. Traveloka aggregates all the available routes and the flight fares altogether for users to choose the best one, without charging extra fees from the users.
To give the users even smoother experiences, Traveloka put a lot of efforts to partner with airlines to enable onsite payments. This made the entire flights booking process easy and secured. You can complete the search and purchase within few easy steps and get ready for your flight. Moreover, Traveloka has partnered with a lot of chained hotels, providing the best prices to users!
Successful Commercial Ads and Marketing
Traveloka pumped consumers’ eyes up with their amusing ads, showing the fun of travel and the convenience of their services, with an impactful tagline “Traveloka first, then The World”, made everyone wanted to sing Take Me Away. One of the reasons that I think the commercial ads would be so successful was they used local dialects and local people to act, this made consumers felt so related.
What you SEE is what you PAY
While other platforms emphasize on providing the cheapest price, Traveloka promises they provide the ‘Honest Price’. No hidden charges or gst or whatsoever, the prices they showed you are the final prices included all taxes. Users wouldn’t need to take out a calculator to calculate the actual price after taxes and additional charges.
The Timing
The fundamental of a successful business is always about the best timing.
Back in 2013, it was when online ticketing industries just started to gain attraction in Indonesia. Moreover, Indonesia was the second fastest-growing Asian economy after China during that time. Nevertheless, the nearly 250 million population in Indonesian is really a big market. Traveloka has exploited the most favorable moment to launch their business.
The Future
Traveling is always on trend in SEA since more airlines popped up to provide us affordable flights. Beside leisure traveling, business trips among countries in SEA also turn up as a new trend. This is because a lot of startups in SEA always try to expand their business to countries nearby, like what Traveloka did. As long as Traveloka keeps their effort on diversified the choices of flights and hotels, never stop optimizing their mobile apps and continue showing us great commercial ads, their company will definitely grow steadily from time to time.
Should I Book Tickets with Traveloka?
Sometimes, we just want to escape from stressful life and spend a long weekend at somewhere nice. You probably wouldn’t have much time to plan the trip, and you don’t have the time to compare all the flight fares and hotels by yourself. But if you have downloaded Traveloka app on your mobile, you could choose the cheapest flight tickets and most favorable accommodation within few minutes.
The best thing is when you felt the prices were slightly over budget, you could set a Price Alert, the app will notify you when they found a ticket that matches your expectation. You wouldn’t need to visit the app every hour to check whether there are any airfare changes.
So, if you wanted to go for a break during the next long weekends or school holidays, you should try ‘Traveloka first’!
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