Car rental lags behind at 47%, but OTAs and AI are closing the gap fast across Asia’s ground transport market
Rail is crushing it online in APAC with 72% of gross bookings going digital in 2025, and state-owned operators are keeping most of that traffic in-house through their own apps rather than handing it off to OTAs. Car rental tells a different story, with online penetration sitting at just 47%, though it’s catching up fast and is expected to overtake offline bookings by 2027.
So why the gap between rail and road, and what’s driving car rental’s rapid shift online? That’s just one of the questions we’ve explored in our latest latest report, Online Travel Tracker: Asia by Road & Rail.
Meanwhile, OTAs aren’t sitting still, with Trip.com, Klook, KKday, and Traveloka building direct rail API integrations across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia, letting travellers skip the ticket counter entirely. Bundling is also becoming a bigger play; Klook uses rail pass purchases to cross-sell hotels and SIM cards, Grab is expanding well beyond ride-hailing into buses, hotels, and even a full AI-powered travel assistant, and platforms like Agoda and Traveloka are weaving buses, ferries, and airport transfers into their core booking flows. AI is showing up on the booking side too, from Booking.com’s ChatGPT-based car rental helper to NAVITIME’s image-recognition tools for foreign travelers navigating signage.
There’s also a wave of specialised startups reshaping ground transport, from split-ticketing apps that shave costs off long train journeys, to peer-to-peer car-sharing platforms scaling across Thailand and South Korea, to AI-driven dynamic routing firms rethinking fixed bus routes altogether. Who are the players to watch, and how are they positioning against the OTA giants?
