Southeast Asia's Online Travel Agency Traveloka Moves Into Food and Wellness Choices

Southeast Asia’s online travel unicorn Traveloka has introduced tours and activities on its platform but beyond eyeing bookings from travelers, it is targeting the domestic market to book not just flights, hotels, and tours and activities, but everything that fulfills so-called lifestyle needs. This includes food, beauty, spas, and movies. The dawning of travel and services rather than tours and activities is here, potentially sending the acronym OTA to the rubbish heap as online travel agencies go beyond flights and hotels into tours and activities and now, lifestyle, as Traveloka has done. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia’s biggest low-cost carrier AirAsia has relaunched its website and app as scheduled this week and it sure looks like an online travel agency, not the traditional airline website. Moreover, it too includes lifestyle offerings and, within this year, will start selling other airlines’ tickets. As predicted by Skift in its Megatrends 2019, online travel agencies will be around a decade from now, but food, activities and rides will be a lot more important to them and the saplings of this future growth are already visible in 2019. All the major players are looking to capture travelers through the entire trip. In Asia, however, as seen, Indonesia-based Traveloka has questioned who the traveler is and what constitutes a trip, resulting in an enlarged scope both in supply and demand for the sector and one that is clearly needed as there is generally little differentiation now in tours and activities offered by online travel agencies. “Our definition of travel has shifted,” said Dannis Muhammad, Traveloka’s chief marketing officer, in an interview with Skift in Singapore. “Before, it’s a trip from, say, Jakarta to Singapore. Then, a trip fr