Traveloka Boss, Spread Wings from the Travel Business to Fintech

Traveloka is one of four startups from Indonesia who now successfully become unicorns. Unicorn is a startup that has an asset valuation of US $ 1 billion.

Now Traveloka has grown from a business that initially only offers aircraft search services online to payment services for products that it sells by installments. The new feature called PayLater is carried out by cooperating with a peer to peer (P2P) lending homeland service that has received permission from the OJK, namely Danamas.

Senior Vice President of Financial Products from Traveloka, Alvin Kumarga said that initially, the Traveloka business began with the anxiety of one of the founders of Traveloka that it was difficult to find plane tickets to return home from abroad to the country. Finally, in 2012, the Traveloka business began by providing a website for ticket search and comparison.

“Actually it started because of one thing. One of the founders of Traveloka was a Padang person. At that time, studying abroad was trying to find a flight to Padang, it was hard to ask for forgiveness. We started metasearch to search for aircraft,” he said in the 2019 Fintech Forum in Indonesia. Dhanapala Auditorium, Ministry of Finance, Jakarta, Wednesday (04/09/2019).

Over time, Traveloka has also changed to a flight ticket reservation site. Start Traveloka in collaboration with local and regional airlines.

“So we are an online travel agent,” he said.

Customer demand continues to grow with the services offered by Traveloka. From the voices of consumers’ desires, the unicorn bearing the white bird logo then spread its wings by providing hotel reservations as accommodation for travel.

“We see travel not only as flying or staying in hotels. People want to discover new things in their lives. Therefore, we don’t just provide flights and accommodations, we do experience,” Alvin said.

Traveloka continues to expand its business to other services such as purchasing cinema tickets, concerts, to tourist attractions. Everything was done with the core business still relying on tourism.

“After that, we hear again from the customer, if you want to travel, you will definitely need funds that are not small. You need the flexibility of payment. This is where payment options can be extended,” Alvin said.

The installment method becomes a feature that is followed by other start-ups. Traveloka’s steps were even followed by several other start-ups to bring similar services.

“Always start with the user problem. Don’t make one product without understanding what the customer’s problem is. We always focus on the customer problem,” he said.