Three Startups in the Tourism Sector Announce Mergers and Form New Holdings

The Indonesian tourism industry is believed to still have such vast potential, there are many slices in it that have not been fully exploited even though many OTA players are present. From that spirit, they decided the top brass of Travelingyuk, Trip, and DeRegent to choose a step to merge and form holding so that services are more integrated with a clear and focused focus.

The three companies above operate under a holding company named PT Turisme Global Diginet (TGD Holding) officially as of July 2019. Natalie Ardianto and Khrisna Mokoginta as commissioner for TGD holding. They are some of the names behind the pioneering of Tiket.com.

For information, fine Let's travel, trip, and this DeRegent was born among the Tiket.com people. Natali and Krishna were also involved as investors for the establishment of Travelingyuk and DeRegent.

Travelingyuk is a tourism-only news portal led by Sa'atul Ihsan. While the trip is marketplace special sales package tours and activities. The CEO is Hendry Prianto, previously worked at Tiket as Head of Product - Hotel Division.

Lastly, DeRegent is the manager tourist information center (TIC), marketing offline advertisements at international airports in the form of videotron. DeRegent is led by Jonggi Manalu, previously he led Tiket from 2014-2017 until it was fully acquired by Blibli.

When viewed, these three companies intersect with each other and are believed to be able to provide synergies for the advancement of the tourism industry.

"The synergy between Travelingyuk, DeRegent, and Trip is interrelated. They need online promotion through Travelingyuk, then DeRegent goes offline. Because we all play in the tourism industry, we finally decided to form a holding company, the three of them will operate under the holding company," TGD Holding Commissioner Khrisna Mokoginta explained to Mr DailySocial.

Natali also added, industrial conditions tours and activities this is not much different than the OTA industry started which was marked by the birth of Tiket. Service provider tours and activities still not touched by the digital world, so the process booking still very manual. But all these problems seem invisible.

"We believe tours and activities This will be huge because now people are buying hotel rooms and travel very cheaply. What we offer is value added, can get a free dinner or pick up from the airport. So from our experience, transactions average in the future it will be much bigger than OTA because valueit's bigger."

From this business decision, Trip will become the main platform before directing the needs of consumers who want to advertise through DeRegent or seek tourism information through articles published by Travelingyuk. Database tour packages from agents tours and activities will also be reproduced ontrip so that consumers have many choices.

Therefore, Khrisna explained that he will gradually strengthen the internal system so that the service to consumers is better and the payment system so that consumers can have more options for transactions on Trip.

Next business plan

CEOtrip Hendry Prianto explained that in the future trip will provide packages tours and activities for activities abroad, not only domestically. The company sees an opportunity that has not been touched even though Traveloka through Traveloka Xperience and Klook, even Tiket itself has penetrated it.

These big companies have not yet penetrated into comprehensive tour packages and tourist attraction tickets provided by SMEs. Most new OTA players touch providers that are well known to tourists.

"Our mission is quite different, we want to help conventional tour agencies to go digital with trips so that they can compete with others. Trips can be channel their new sales," said Hendry.

In terms of transactions, Hendry said his company had produced transactions, but they were not considered big. Because it has not carried out any promotional activities since its inception.

He said trip had partnered with 80 tour operators and offered 1200 tour packages. After the company's merger into holding, Hendry will expand partnerships with 1000 tour operators until the end of this year.

Tour agents who want to join must meet several general requirements, they must be legal entities and have a clear office address in order to minimize the potential for fraud.

All of the products displayed on Trip will most likely also be available at Lapak videotron DeRegent's eight international airports. Such as at Soetta Airport (Cengkareng), Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin (Palembang), Silangit (Medan), and Minangkau (Padang).

Not only that, videotron this can be a promotional event for SMEs to be increasingly known by tourists. Also market information published through Travelingyuk. In terms of achievement, this online media site is claimed to have been visited by 195 million times since January 2018-April 2019. From that number, its loyal readers reached 33 million people.

In order for these three startups to grow rapidly, Natali said that her party is currently raising funds for Series A. The process is still ongoing and is expected to be completed by the end of August 2019.