Goindonesia.com (left), which will initially feature hotel and transfer bookings and later airline and package tours, will offer a range of payment options such as Internet banking, closed-amount payments via ATM, and credit card transactions.
Catching up with Scott Blume (below), newly-appointed CEO of Raja Kamar, the day after the KAHA joint venture was announced, I asked the online travel veteran if this signalled the beginning of exciting times for Indonesia. “Yes, it shows the market is waking up and you can be sure we will see a few more plays announced,” he said. 
Acknowledging that Goindonesia.com will be head-on competition for Raja Kamar, Blume said, “Our differentiator is our deliberate approach to be as comprehensive and deep in content as possible. We have hotels in 135 cities, some of them I didn’t even know existed before now, so it’s not just Bali and Jakarta.
“And we will have a Bahasa site only, no English for the moment. We want it to make it a pure domestic play for now.”
However that does not exclude plans to venture into other markets where Indonesians are frequent travellers. “There are opportunities for some niche partnerships and acquisitions in nearby Asian markets with direct access to content such as Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Vietnam, either through partnerships or equity positions over time.”
Its acquisition of MG Holidays gives it a B2B play, to complement Raja Kamar’s B2C platform. The former CEO of ZUJI/Travelocity, who’s moved to Jakarta in his new role, sees good growth potential for both platforms, predicting a 20% growth for MG Holidays and “because B2C is so new to Indonesia, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 50% year on year growth”.
Blume likened Raja Kamar to more of the Chinese OTA Ctrip model where he expects 80% of bookings to be fulfilled at call centres – the company will have 200 staff handling calls in the Jakarta call centre. The issue of ticket delivery will be solved by having printable vouchers.
While he said Indonesians were not big on credit cards yet, they liked using bank transfers “and that’s fine with us”, he said.
The Rajakamar.com site, in soft launch, will be upgraded in the next few months. Said Blume, “We need more reviews. We have done a great deal in providing depth of content but we could do better with marketing the content online.”
He added, “We will do some clever marketing to make sure the brand stands out – we will use some traditional media but will be looking for smart social media ideas.
“Our shareholders have said they will invest US$20 million in the next five years and a large chunk of that will go into marketing as well as technology development and partnerships.” Raja Kamar is a partnership between three of Indonesia’s competing inbound operators – Panorama Group, Dwidaya Tour and Travel, and Smailing Tours.
Search will also play a role in marketing and Blume said, “It will be fascinating where the future of search will be in Indonesia. Indonesia’s ecommerce is starting at a stage where the search business is more mature. Elswhere, OTAs took off as paid search was beginning and evolving. Now search is only a piece of the puzzle while social is immature and growing.”
What’s for certain is that it will not be buying branded keywords on the principle of partnership with suppliers, said Blume.
Raja Kamar will work on the nett rates model. It will also be bulk buying on the B2B side to protect availability during peak periods. While he said rates will be very competitive and targeted at domestic travellers, there’s nothing to stop overseas customers (say from Malaysia) from buying on the site.
Asked how this would affect hoteliers who might have offered the rates only for domestic, Blume said, “This will be a test case for hoteliers on how they look after domestic business.”
It does look like all the pieces are in place for Raja Kamar to do well. Indonesia is a thriving economy with 6.5% GDP growth, low cost airlines are making it possible for more people to travel, the domestic market is huge in a country of nearly 240 million and ecommerce is nascent and can only get bigger and the Indonesian customer is a highly digital and social animal – it is Facebook’s second largest market and Blackberry’s biggest market.
“Well, at least one thing is clear, we will only do a Blackberry app,” laughed Blume.
So what could possibly go wrong? “What’s clear is there will be more and more adoption online, just a question of how fast. With online adoption, people will look for content and then contact a call centre – again, how fast will that be?
“So I guess the only thing that could go wrong is the speed of adoption and how much money we have to spend in marketing to facilitate that.”
