Emulating Tesla, Yanolja wants to use tech to grow travel and hospitality market to $3,000 billion

Digitizing and connecting spaces, launching Interpark, leveraging K-pop, testing NFTs and metaverse, South Korea’s travel unicorn has a lot to do in 2022

Just as Tesla scaled the car market from $100-2000 billion to $5000 billion, Yanolja believes that through its technological solutions and global ambitions, it can expand the travel and hospitality market to $3000 billion.

“Our vision is very ambitious,” Jongyoon Kim, CEO of Yanolja and Yanolja Cloud, said in an interview on “From Unicorn to Decacorn: Lessons from Globalization” at WiT Japan & North Asia 2022. “We’re envisioning a world where technology digitizes and connects spaces of all kinds, and personalizes those spaces as you travel from place to place.”

The vision he sees as achievable in 8 years by 2030 includes a variety of physical spaces beyond hotels and a metaverse that he thinks is ideal for travel, because they’re about two things, content and inventory, and travel is plentiful.

“We’re just getting started,” said Yanolja’s Kim, who bucked the trend in 2021, raising $1.7 billion, expanding globally, forming partnerships in key markets like Vietnam and acquiring two companies South Korean companies whose growth ambitions are critical have gone from unicorns to decacorns – 70% of Interpark’s e-commerce business and ad-tech company Dable.

Currently, Yanolja connects about 50,000 spaces, which will double by this year, and that number could grow to 1 million spaces by 2025, he said. Despite Covid, the company achieved 107% growth last year, mostly from the hotel tech industry. “This is a very important driver, we can accelerate the growth rate,” he said.

To expand in North Asia, it is looking for a partnership similar to the one it struck with VNLIFE, Vietnam’s largest payments company, which owns VNTravel. “We already have more than 350 partners in 170 countries, including dealers, and we’re looking for new partners who can digitize the space,” Kim said.

New partnerships are expected to be announced in Japan, China, North America, Europe and Southeast Asia, and “we are already discussing details with specific partners,” he said.

To complement its SaaS business, it will launch Interpark as its travel and lifestyle brand outside of Korea. Yanolja bought 70 percent of Interpark’s e-commerce business late last year, buying a stake in the South Korean e-commerce giant for about $250 million.

“Interpark is already No. 1 in B2C air ticket booking and entertainment ticketing markets such as concerts and sports,” and is also the leading outbound player in Korea. Yanolja’s plan is to develop Interpark’s travel and lifestyle products, using e-commerce to expand its travel vertical globally.

He wants to connect “flight and entertainment” with space, “We are in talks with many hotels and owners to combine entertainment and space to diversify the guest experience”.

With the acquisition of ad tech company Dable, it will roll out personalization for its hotel customers for better targeting and personalized offers. More than half of Dable’s revenue already comes from outside South Korea, with Southeast Asia a major market.

He sees Dable as Yanolja’s connector between suppliers and customers, enabling suppliers to send personalized offers and customers to receive them.

AI Hotels, Net Zero Carbon, Metaverse, NFTs – All on the Radar

Kim sees Yanolja’s globalization plan as having two pillars – one by developing “artificial intelligence hotels” and the other by using its technology to help hotels achieve net-zero carbon emissions.

He described an “AI hotel” as “the foundation is the cloud, where we do the data flow, and then we can connect every (part of) AI technology there”. Its first “AI hotel” is the H1 Hotel in Gwangju, and the second, part of the Ramada Group, is under construction and will open in the first half of this year.

On carbon neutrality, he said, with 8% of carbon emissions coming from travel, it would be difficult for the industry to meet its Paris Agreement targets. “We need a very clear roadmap to solve this problem, and we believe that Yanolja Cloud is the solution to help achieve carbon neutrality… We want to be the leading company in solving the problem of net zero carbon emissions.”

Another pillar of Yanolja’s globalization strategy is to capitalize on the popularity of Korean pop culture and use travel as a tool to “carry K-pop culture” around the world. “Interpark has over 70% market share in the entertainment business – we sell over 70% of BTS tickets in Korea – we have all the data on K-pop entertainment…Tourism is the most important vehicle for culture and content.”

If popular content or culture is only consumed domestically, it doesn’t help any country’s GDP, he said. However, if a travel company like Yanolja could leverage the data it has (like the data it has on groups like BTS) and distribute that content, “then their volume could be multiplied.”

Kim is most optimistic about the future of Metaverse and NFTs in travel. In his view, “The travel industry consists of content and inventory, and Metaverse is a new interface that integrates online and offline. In addition, NFTs will be the key to improving inventory transparency and improving operational efficiency,” he said.

In South Korea, which is combining its tickets with NFTs, “we can control the resale of tickets, which is very important for entertainment establishments”.

Metaverse also needs more content, “This is why the value of the content industry is rising, and I believe the content in the travel industry is the largest among other industries. If we can effectively utilize content and inventory through new data technologies such as NFTs,” then He sees Metaverse as a major trend to watch in travel.

Yanolja intends to be an innovator and early adopter, creating use cases for traveling NFTs and the metaverse, he said.

Watch the full interview video.