Emulating Tesla, Yanolja wants to use tech to grow travel and hospitality market to $3,000 billion
Digitising and connecting spaces, rolling out Interpark, leveraging K-pop, testing NFT and metaverse, South Korea’s travel unicorn has a lot on its plate for 2022
JUST as Tesla has expanded the size of the car market from around $1,000-$2,000 billion to $5,000 billion, Yanolja believes that t [...]
From sake tourism to temple stays, ESG to metaverse, North Asia waits patiently for rebound
“KIKO No Ikioi” – Japanese saying for “no choice but to carry on” – and travel companies in North Asia have certainly carried on even though cross-border travel remains at a standstill, two years into the pandemic. Global to local OTAs have carried on investing in tech, team and product [...]
What a journey ahead – buzzwords for 2022
New Normal, Metaverse, “I minted my own NFT”, Connectivity – what’s yours?
WELL, 2021 has been quite the journey and it looks like we could be in for another journey in 2022, the way the year is starting out. And there, I’ve done it – committed the crime of the journalist’s profess [...]
From Volaris to OYO, why Ramirez chose to have skin in the game at Katanox
JULIANA Ramirez was working at OYO Hotels when she got a visit from the founders of Katanox, the startup offering direct API connectivity between sellers and hotels.
Ramirez, who has just joined OYO in 2020 after a 10-year stint with ultra low cost Mexican airline Volaris, knew first hand the c [...]
New generation of startups will change France’s travel scene, and why DMCs remain critical to the trip
Cambon Partners' Morgann Lesne on what makes French travel tech tick or not tick these days
HAVING lunch with investment banker Morgann Lesne in Paris late December, our conversation turned to the acquisition of Etraveli Group by Booking Holdings and we wondered if France has the capability to p [...]
The boy who liked to fix things and now he wants to fix corporate travel tech
After a three-decade journey, Johnny Thorsen believes he’s in right spot at right time to achieve life’s ambition
EVEN as a child, Johnny Thorsen remembers his interest in pulling things apart and then trying to put them together again in a new and better way.
“That’s
what my mother t [...]
Yanolja Cloud acquires Dable to beef up AI and big data in hotel solutions
CONTINUING with its ambition to be “number one travel company in the world” and to grow Yanolja from unicorn to decacorn, Yanolja Cloud has acquired South Korea-based ad tech company Dable to strengthen its AI technology in the global market.
Dable, started in 2015 in Seoul by four entrepren [...]
Pandemic boom in fitness gives RunGo wings to fly
WiT Startup Pitch 2021 finalist RunGo, described as the “#1 running app for discovering the best routes in the world”, is hoping to tap into the pandemic-induced craze of running, walking and general wellness and fitness trends to fuel the next lap in its startup journey.
Noah Bloom was [...]
Pace, The Atlas, Spotnana – fuelled by experience, passion and funding
Three startups, helmed by seasoned entrepreneurs, the ones to watch
IF there is one
trend we’ve seen in the startup world, it’s that seasoned entrepreneurs are
returning to solve problems they’ve either been working on for a long time or
turning their eye to new and hot spaces they hope to [...]
Think novel practice and how to avoid the hippo problem
Covid has changed rules globally, learn from “lean startup Africa”
IN a “lean startup” continent like Africa, “novel” practices work best when it comes to innovation, according to Professor Hemmanth (Herman) Singh, speaking at the inaugural WiT Africa – that means not “best” or [...]
