“Nothing guaranteed, everything possible” is sentiment of the day
WHEN things have gone full circle, it can look like they’ve stayed still, but at the WiT Travel Roadshow Episode 4, four travel players tell us they’ve been very busy indeed, making bold bets for the future while honouring business basics.
Stephan Ekbergh, CEO of Travelstart, describes realising that “faffing around too much in the analytics, you know, probably wouldn’t work because there was nothing to analyse”, and instead having to become “real entrepreneurs again”.
Saying “everything has changed, yet nothing”, Ekbergh says Travelstart continues to “do what [it was] doing before, but… obviously, doing it better,” while trying to figure out what the future will look like.
For now, Ekbergh says, he’s looking at opportunities in payments and the luxury travel segment. Travelstart is also catering to digital nomads with a bespoke service called Day One, that helps nomads work from Cape Town.
During the pandemic, Kei Shibata, the co-founder and CEO of LINE TRAVEL jp and Trip101, doubled down on chat in travel distribution, launching a chat based corporate travel booking tool that integrates with LINE WORKS.
Shibata likened the process to learning to snowboard after skiing for 10 years, saying “we confirm that messaging and chat works for travel, so this actually made us make this move, but then we actually started developing our products and everything, and of course we realised that it’s a totally different ballgame…. So, we built an entirely separate team, actually dedicated to that.”
For the Etraveli Group, a B2B player powering consumer brands, the big bet during the pandemic was on managing cashflow to avoid external debt, which, Lisa Katsouraki, SVP of corporate development tells us, it managed to do successfully.
The group looks to be in good shape for a recovery, as Katsouraki says, “we have now surpassed 2019 volumes when it comes to bookings. Obviously, the profitability is not exactly the same as it was before considering it’s a different type of composition of sales, but… fatigue is actually starting to give its way over to, you know, happy faces, where you can really see the outcome of your work throughout this tough time.”
In keeping with the theme, Gaery Undarsa, the co-founder and CMO of tiket.com is also coming full circle. Having been fully bought out by e-commerce site Blibli in 2017, the founders of tiket.com have reacquired some of their shares, signalling their intention to keep betting on the OTA space.
“We’re really interested in the business for the longer term,” says Undarsa.
Payments could set travel sector alight
And what does the longer term look like? While crystal-ball-gazing is never easy, our panel is unanimous about payments.
With more than 200 million enterprises, and 1.7 billion adults worldwide lacking access to banking facilities, unlocking payments means providing a crucial service to a completely underserved market.
Undarsa tells us “Indonesia right now is super-hot on fintech,” saying that companies in the sector are seeing some of the “highest valuations ever”.
The Etraveli Group has also grown a strong payments team, Katsouraki shares, continuing “we’ve been quite invested, quite a bit in localising in different geographies, and it’s pretty important to do so, being a global player considering, you know, the differences of acceptability and the different rates that we can have access to is a key piece of the equation of being able to sell flights where margins are pretty narrow.”
Payments are also accelerating in Japan where Shibata highlights how QR code payments and mobile wallets have taken off in a big way.
Referring to the developments around payments, Ekbergh is excited, and expects it will “set the business off on a different trajectory,” but sees it as very much fait accompli, as “Mastercard and others are completely revamping their distribution methods and moving away from the banks into the houses of the merchants. So, those that are not doing it will be a little bit left behind.”
In fact, asked about the tech that they are most proud of having created during the pandemic, Ekbergh points to Travelstart’s payment business as his winner. For Shibata, the answer is TRAVEL JP for business. Katsouraki identifies the acquisition of TripStack, an air technology specialist, as hers. And Undarsa highlights Tiket Homes as his choice, calling it “practically the Airbnb of Indonesia”.
The things that went wrong
Not all the bets that were made were winners though, Ekbergh rues his attempt at “trying to convert our whole development team into becoming an outsource partner for third parties,” calling it a “dog show”.
Tiket.com had an unexpected “flop” with Tiket Flexi, a product they built which was supposed to offer flexible bookings on flights and hotels, thinking that with all the uncertainty around travel, it was the right product for the time.
Apparently not, Undarsa discovered, in fact “the user still wants to book through exact dates”. Instead, they turned to insurance to give users peace of mind and a different kind of flexibility.
Having (mostly) weathered the ups and downs of the last 18 months, the panellists are cognisant of the battles to come.
In particular, “losing team members and talents, especially young people – tech talents”, was tough to watch for Shibata.
Undarsa echoes the sentiment, saying “star talents, they really like to be in action,” but the industry isn’t recovering as quickly as they’d like.
Katsouraki foresees struggles with straddling “old versus new ways of working” and having to resolve tensions around attitudes to work post-Covid for example with the desire for “remote work, versus still being able to be productive.”
For his part, Ekbergh thinks that staying agile and “on your toes” is what will be needed, citing the variance in travel trends worldwide. He describes how in Africa, banks and insurance companies first moved into travel, then left the space, while elsewhere e-commerce is now moving into travel.
In the future, he says, “we can’t look at China and say, this is where the world is going, we can’t look at America. Everything is going to be very much geographically or culturally determined, you know, where things are going.”
Despite these challenges, there is genuine excitement about the future. The upheavals and disruptions to old business models have had a shaking out effect that leaves the field wide open to current players.
And the lack of certainty regarding where this ends up also means that it’s an open road, with nothing guaranteed and everything possible, a chance if you will, for the industry to come full circle too.
• Featured image credit: Angel Mato/Getty Images
