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Traveloka has acquired three online travel agencies (OTAs) – Indonesia’s Pegipegi, Vietnam’s Mytour, and the Philippines’ Travelbook – for USD 66.8 million earlier this year. It’s a sign of Traveloka’s expanding presence in the region and increasing dominance of the OTA sector at home. Traveloka was most recently said to be raising USD 400 million in order to move beyond airplane and hotel bookings. Aside from its home country of Indonesia, the travel unicorn is also present in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Before the acquisition, all three companies were subsidiaries of Japanese company Recruit Holdings. In a statement from January, Recruit Holdings stated that its entire holdings of the three companies are transferred to Jet Tech Innovation Ventures Pte Ltd, a company registered in Singapore. The Recruit Holdings announcement also said Jet Tech was founded on October 20, 2017 as an investment holding company situated at 2 Shenton Way #18-01 SGX Centre I Singapore, with net assets of . That company’s sole shareholder is Jet Tech Ventures Pte Ltd, which is wholly owned by Traveloka and counts CEO Ferry Unardi as a director. Among others, Jet Tech’s director Hendrik Susanto is currently chief strategy and investment officer of Traveloka. Traveloka and Jet Tech also share the same office address in Singapore while PegiPegi CEO Kevin Sandjaja and head of marketing Serlina Wijaya have been identified as former employees of the Indonesian travel tech giant. Traveloka declined to comment. Recruit Holdings, which recently acquired the jobs and recruitment platform Glassdoor, cited Southeast Asia’s competitive OTA market as the reason behind the sale. In announcing the deal in January, Recruit Holdings said it had decided to sell its three subsidiaries because of the competitive OTA services market in the ASEAN region and to refocus on its core business, which is developing labor SaaS products. In 2016, Travelbook reported a loss of approximately USD 2.5 million and net sales of USD 701,000, while Mytour reported a loss of approximately USD 2.1 million and net sales of USD 5.5 million. Both companies reported losses for all three years between 2014 to 2016. Pegipegi, meanwhile, reported profits of USD 158,000 from net sales of approximately USD 29 million in 2016. That number, however, is a whopping 94% decrease compared to the previous year’s.
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