A year after its rebranding into LINE Travel jp, following a 34% equity investment by the messaging giant, Japan’s travel meta-search service will offer its customers a LINE Point-back service when they book and pay for travel bookings through its website effective September 25.
At the same time, customers will also earn LINE points from the range of travel brands which have partnered with the Japanese company in this new service. Partner brands include Japan Airlines, Expedia, Trip.com, Booking.com, Ikyu, NTTdocomo, Rakuten and Airbnb, to name a handful.
CEO Kei Shibata said, “This makes us the first meta-search player in the world to integrate a two-tier Point system in our service.”
Additionally, customers will be able to transfer their points to LINE Pay (one point equal to one Japanese yen in value) and pay for everyday goods and services, as well as travel products, covered by LINE Pay. “As a user myself of LINE Pay, I transfer all my points to it and I never use my own money at convenience stores,” said Shibata.
He said the company had been planning and working on launching this service for at least a year. “It sounds easy but it’s highly technical, a lot of work needed to be done to integrate all the services.”
Added Shibata, “Meta-searches are not unique anymore, there are so many around and we have to come up with a differentiator. For example, if you want to stay at Sheraton Waikiki and you search on meta-search websites, everyone is offering the same prices – Trivago, Booking, KAYAK, us – because of price parity.”
This is why it felt that “creating a website in which users could understand at a glance not only the real price displayed by travel agencies, but payment methods and point-back as well” would differentiate its offering.
The LINE Point-back service was first implemented on LINE Travel jp (the LINE app version) in January and when the company saw how effective it was in increasing bookings, it decided to expand the service to its web version, which has 25 million monthly users. “Now we are proud to test the industry’s first meta-search Point-back service.”
Shibata said he used to think the culture of loyalty points was unique to Japan but since speaking to partners in the industry, he said, “it seems to be unique to Asia”. “Fliggy has Fliggy points and Yatra in India also uses points when I thought India was more about direct discounts. But people are using a mix of points and direct discounts. And look at how big Grab Points is. Points matter a lot in Asia.”
With the launch of LINE Point-back service on both its app and website, Shibata said LINE had also become the first superapp “to do something on the web”.
Indeed, the partnership between the travel meta-search company and LINE has proved an interesting cross-learning experience.
“What LINE has learnt from us is how this industry works – it’s complicated like they didn’t expect. The distribution is very different from other verticals, plus the business is also global and highly fragmented.
“On our part, we have learnt how to think out of the box and how to use tech platforms – core assets that we could never have had access to as a standalone travel company. Plus, the speed at which they operate – we have been trying to speed up but they are going faster.”
Since LINE took a 34% stake in the company, LINE Travel jp now has 19 million friends on LINE and “it’s giving us extra bookings and revenues on a daily basis and thousands of transactions on the app”.
He also noted that 90% of of bookings happen within the first half hour of push notifications sent through the LINE app.
With 81m users everyday on LINE, Shibata said that clearly the app is the dominant platform but “the weakness of the app, unlike the web, is you are not able to see the specific user intent. On the web, you search with specific key words, and so demand is very specific and transparent. That’s the benefit of the web as a platform.”
As for whether it’d leverage LINE’s presence outside Japan to expand outside its home market to Taiwan and Thailand, for example, Shibata said, “We see how it goes.”
He added, “The partnership has transformed our business on the app space but with this new service, it’s just beginning in the web space. And there has been no cannibalization – they are two different spaces and we do not cross-sell on the platforms.”
Shibata said push notifications being used by superapps had changed the notion of how consumers buy travel from pull to push. In future, he said, “I think it’s going to be merged. If I search for something like things to do in Honolulu, I will search on Google and if I find a LINE Travel article on top 20 things to do, I can imagine that some AI-assisted chatbot will start to recommend me things to do – so that becomes the initial start of push. We will see hybrid models going forward.”
• Note: Superapps, payments and loyalty will be a pivotal point of discussion at this year’s WIT Singapore 2019. Sign up here.
