A new OTA in Vietnam, which started out around a social idea, is trying to get young Vietnamese to travel independently by making travel booking “easy, transparent, friendly and sociable”.
Alehap’s co-founder Simon Christy (below), who comes from an advertising background (he worked with Ogilvy) and is fluent in Vietnamese, told WIT, “We are funky, slightly surprising, personal and approachable. Our prices are always competitive and our service always fast and friendly.”
It launched quietly two years ago as an idea without any advertising or PR. “At that time Alehap was an idea and a test amongst other “digital things” we were doing,” said Christy. But encouraged by the growth of its fan base to 1,000 in the first few days, now it’s 100% of his focus and business.
Although the site has not officially launched yet, Alehap has reached over 180,000 fans on Facebook, “plus tens of thousands more direct, all largely through word-of-mouth. More importantly they’re the right people and they’re interacting, inquiring and buying from us every day.”
Launching an online travel business in Vietnam has its challenges, said Christy. “The travel industry in Vietnam is still slow to shift towards online, let alone understand mobile and social. The market friction is high – with largely cash/bank payment vs mobile/credit card. B2b business is done the old fashioned way. So online travel businesses have to be hybrids, effectively running both on and offline models. Clearly, as we grow and push forwards, the friction reduces. But it’s still early days.”
The boom in Vietnam is happening now, he said, reeling off a string of statistics – 91m population, 31m people online (growing by 1.5m per annum), 11.7m on Facebook (up 38% in 6 months). 66% of Vietnamese using the web everyday, 70m active mobile subscribers, 16% of mobiles are smartphones, 12m using 3g.
“They adopt technologies and new ways of doing things extremely quickly. I could go on …” 
Here’s a summary of Alehap’s business model.
Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
Alehap is a Social OTA. We’ve grown out of a core community on social media, largely out of word of mouth to +200,000 members. And we’ve designed our OTA (the range of travel products and services) around it, in the way they most want to buy.
Q: Who are your key customers?
Young(ish), 21-35 year old women, based in the main urban centers of Vietnam.
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
I’m not aware of another OTA that has grown exclusively and developed out of a social community. We’d like to be a socialized CTrip when we grow-up, we’re just entering our teenage years right now.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
We give them the inspiration, the confidence, the knowledge and all the products so they can travel independently. The young FIT traveler segment is a fast growing sector, Alehap is probably in some part responsible for driving that demand and passion amongst young Vietnamese.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
So far we’re self-funded. This summer we’ll probably take investment to help us expand faster and roll out new products.
Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
Customers! The whole business idea, the brand, the concept, the content has been shaped around our daily (hourly) feedback and conversations with customers over the last few years. We are building Alehap around that.
Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
The revenue model is mostly the same as any OTA, with a largely commerce based business (a smaller % of advertising revenue). However, given our social nature we have scope for unique products that wouldn’t be possible with a non-social OTA.
We’re close to profitability now. 
Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
Vietnamese consumers are changing fast, especially the younger segment. E-commerce is happening now. Smartphones are the norm. Travel is cool and young Vietnamese want to see what the rest of the world has to offer, asap.
We’re building Alehap to be as efficient and scalable from the outset. However, there are plenty of non-digital working practices in the industry here that will improve as time goes by – as more of the domestic industry comes online, we’ll smooth things out.
Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Strengths – high brand awareness and “love” from our members, network effects
Weaknesses – not fully rolled out with all our products (yet)
Opportunities – Market growth, shift online/mobile, supply chain moving online
Threats – Economic shocks, New market entrants
Q: Who are the team members and advisors?
Simon Christy, CEO, started out in advertising (Ogilvy) and switched to a hosting start-up in 1999, which listed on LSE. Ran digital marketing and strategy at The Times and latterly across The Sun’s $100m portfolio of online properties (gambling, gaming, e-com, media). Fluent in Vietnamese.
Tomo, CTO – Japanese-born American with Japanese and Vietnamese parents. Recruited for Hewlett-Packard’s supercomputer division while in school and then picked up by a VC backed network security startup before graduating. Latterly consulting on web development for e-commerce companies in Silicon Valley.
Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
We understand the market, the culture, the nuisances intimately, but have track records from overseas too. So we have a little crystal ball on where things will be, have the experience to execute but can tailor Alehap exactly to the local tastes.
Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?
The personal motivation is to create a young, vibrant and hugely successful travel online brand online for young people. It’s a complex, messy, distributed market that needs consolidating, needs better service levels.
We could have gone with a straight copycat model of overseas OTA’s, but we’ve taken it further…
