Skift Travel News Blog

A Palestinian delegation was at ITB Asia tourism trade show in Singapore, despite the war and humanitarian crisis at home.

“Palestine is a tourism destination and a political state with a significant historical background,” said Majed Ishaq, director general of marketing for Palestinian ministry of tourism. “Come to our country through Palestinian tour operators. Spend money in Palestine and help to contribute towards our economy.”

Ishaq told Skift that the ministry had previously decided to attend the trade show and didn’t want to back out. “We had already booked a space and paid for the construction of the stand, making it impossible to cancel our participation.”

Ishaq said many tour operators from Southeast Asia work with Israeli tour operators to visit Palestinian areas and he also wanted to establish direct collaborations with these operators.

Ishaq expressed hope for a peaceful resolution and a gradual return to normalcy. Since the war between Israel and Hamas began earlier this month, travel to the region has shut down, with most major airlines suspending service.

Tripla, which provides a booking engine to hotels in Japan and Southeast Asia, has acquired a travel tech company in Indonesia.

Tripla said it has acquired a 53% stake in BookandLink, which provides software to help hotels track and manage sales through third-party distribution channels. 

The other 47% of BookandLink was acquired by the Development Bank of Japan, Tripla said.

Tripla said the acquisition is part of a larger goal to create a more comprehensive booking and distribution platform for hoteliers. 

Besides a booking engine, Tripla offers products around chatbots, payments, and customer data management. The company said its technology was live in more than 2,400 hotels in Japan as of July 2023, and business is continuing to expand in East Asia, including in South Korea and Taiwan.

And BookandLink was used by more than 2,600 hotels in Indonesia as of July 2023, with a growing presence in Southeast Asia, the company said. 

“The majority of the 50,000 accommodations in Indonesia still use manual processes with pen and paper, motivating us to develop our market further,” said Philippe Raunet, CEO of BookandLink, in a statement.

Tripla said it plans to integrate the two companies and their technologies over the next three years. BookandLink’s founders and roughly 30 employees are joining Tripla.

Tripla started trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last November with an initial public offering of $5.6 million (¥823.2 million). The company’s stock is down over 13% year to date.

Japanese airline company All Nippon Airways (ANA) is preparing to launch its new airline Air Japan in February 2024, unveiling a brand positioning of affordability, comfort and diversity for its cabin crew. 

The medium-haul offering sits firmly between the full-service concept of carrier ANA and its low-cost airline Peach Aviation to meet travel demand from Southeast Asia to Japan. It will compete against Japan Airlines subsidiary, Zipair, which offers similar products. 

The airline company has yet to confirm routes and cities for the new airline but recently unveiled select products and services as part of its Fly Thoughtful brand concept.

The cabin will be configured with 324 economy class seats, a seat pitch of 32 inches and a recline feature. The seats won’t have monitors and are made of lightweight material, which is expected to add to its fuel efficiency.

In a push for diversity and inclusion, the company stated its cabin attendants’ uniforms are designed to “value the unique qualities” of its crew, reflecting gender neutrality. It will also be made in-part from plant-derived fabrics.

The Air Japan website is live, but ticket sales have yet to be opened. 

Indonesia’s leading online travel agency Traveloka will be receiving a fresh round of funding of $300 million from Indonesia Investment Authority — the newly-formed sovereign wealth fund of Indonesia, investment management agency — BlackRock, Allianz Global Investors, Orion Capital Asia and other global financial institutions.

The financing round is said to have attracted significant interest from a number of long-term capital providers, resulting in an oversubscribed transaction, according to an Indonesia Investment Authority release on Thursday.

A Skift article in June had mentioned that the online travel unicorn had been looking to raise over $200 million, having already raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding across six rounds.

The financing would allow Traveloka an opportunity to further strengthen its balance sheet and enable the online travel company to continue to focus on its core business while also building for the future, Ferry Unardi, CEO and co-founder of Traveloka, said.

The pandemic has heightened the expectation for digital products, Shirley Lesmana, chief marketing officer of Traveloka, had said while speaking at the Skift Global Forum in New York last week.

With online travel agencies in Indonesia seeing their share of gross tourism booking increase from 24 percent pre-pandemic to 33 percent in 2021, the expectation is to reach 36 percent by 2024, said Ridha Wirakusumah, CEO of Indonesia Investment Authority.

With the pandemic having accelerated digital transformation, the financing would support Traveloka’s digital ecosystem growth in the travel sector while allowing the company to grow further, the release from Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund stated.

“The financing aligns with Indonesia Investment Authority’s mission to create prosperity for Indonesia in the long term, by laying down the foundation for a sustainable digital ecosystem, including digital infrastructure, digital services and digital platforms — which will go a long way to drive economic recovery and growth,” Wirakusumah said.

Representatives from the financial institutions commended Traveloka’s resilience in navigating the Covid crisis and called the online travel company Indonesia’s national and regional champion and a key catalyst toward digitalization of travel and accommodation in the country and the region.