“We’re focusing on getting the business back post-Covid and scaling really, really fast with our existing operators.”

When we last spoke about Bookaway, it was Noam Toister, CEO and co-founder of Bookaway Group, who said that business in Asia was more affected than elsewhere because it was reliant on European and American inbound travellers. “We weren’t localised enough to sell to Thais and Filipinos, that’s something we want to change.”

Back then, Bookaway’s Top 9 Routes in APAC was made up almost entirely of Thai destinations, with Vietnam barely sneaking in at #9. According to Omer Chehmer, COO and co-founder of Bookaway Group, things have changed quite a bit in the last few months. 

“The diversity has completely changed, we are much more global this year. Vietnam is currently not in the Top 10 because it’s not fully recovered – it’s only 30% recovered from a tourism point of view. We have countries like Philippines, Cambodia, India, Indonesia – we see them in the Top 10 in APAC and we also have much more diversity including Latin America and Europe.”

Omer Chehmer, COO and co-founder, Bookaway Group

The increased diversity isn’t surprising. Many countries, in Asia and beyond, have loosened pandemic restrictions, allowing people to move freely across borders. What’s even less surprising is Bookaway’s agility on the shifting nature of the APAC tourism scene – something that the brand seemed to be comfortable with even during their previous chat with WiT. 

“We are already seeing in Asia, although the travel market is at 60% recovery, we are way, way above it”, said Omer, who was stationed in Thailand during our virtual catch-up. 

“In the last month, we experienced 160% recovery versus 2019. And I do think that it’s still the beginning actually – because there are still countries that are not [fully] open yet, Vietnam is still lagging behind, so I’m really optimistic about the future. As markets open up, we’ll see more than 150% recovery than what we’re seeing now.”

Omer also emphasises that Bookaway has been anticipating the rush for a while now. 

“We’ve been planning since last October. Our company is moving to a centralised technology hub to allow us to be much more efficient, much more technology-driven and data-driven, and this is something we prepared during Covid and now we’re fully prepared for the scale coming from Asia.”

Welcome back, China

Of course, the big news coming out of Asia is none other than the reopening of China – a beast unlike any other in terms of outbound traffic, consumer behaviour, and spending power. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), before the pandemic, China was the world’s largest outbound travel market by departure numbers and spending. In 2019 alone, Chinese travelers took 154.6 million trips abroad and spent nearly $255 billion.

Trip.com Group data showed that outbound flight bookings from China increased 254% in late December, one day after it was announced that travel restrictions would be eased on January 8. So far, the most popular destinations are Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand.

In 2019, Thailand was the No. 1 most-visited destination by Chinese travelers, welcoming around 11 million Chinese tourists — over a quarter of the country’s overseas arrivals. This puts China’s outbound traffic firmly in Bookaway’s eyeline, even though Omer says the country was never a big part of their business plan to begin with. 

“We had Chinese [tourists] coming to Thailand and Vietnam and Japan, but it was not a significant part of our business. But, now that our product is much more prepared to allow the Chinese to come book with us, I think this is a bonus for us – this is something we didn’t count on and hasn’t affected our business yet, but now that China [has opened], it’ll be a substantial increase in our revenue that we didn’t plan for.”

Ground-and-sea transportation, and delivering digitisation

However, what was part of the plan, is the rising popularity of platforms like Bookaway. Whether it’s an increased awareness of sustainability and carbon emissions, or just a desire to travel more “authentically”, ground transportation has been picking up steam (pun intended) in the years post-Covid. According to a fascinating article by the BBC, only 11% of the global population took a flight in 2018 and at most 4% took an international flight. Even in the UK, over half of people didn’t fly at all in a given year, even before the pandemic.

Omer says, “We operate in places where the digitisation is really slow and there’s not a lot of online capability to book these services. The reason they’re in our Top 10 is because this is the pain point we’re trying to solve – we’re coming to these countries, we are digitising the supply, we are allowing operators to sell their tickets online, we are inserting technology into places where they’re still not technologised yet. And also providing services – localised and international – that allow international tourists to book it really easily. “

A shaky economy and targeted growth

Apart from China’s reopening of its figurative floodgates and an uneven approach to endemicity across the globe, 2023 brings with it the tag-team challenge of Inflation and Recession – something that platforms like Bookaway have to actively tackle or risk kowtowing to price surges from partners, vendors, and other operators. 

Omer, however, is confident that the Group can keep prices in check. “On a more macro level, I do think yes, there is a recession, and we see prices go up in all travel services including flights and hotels and I think that’s one of the best things about our services that it’s still… even if it goes up by 10%… it’s still cheap versus taking a flight. Now, the way we’re tackling it internally is… firstly, we’re not increasing prices and we’re not bringing [higher] prices to the customers, we’re actually helping our suppliers with the cash flow, we’re doing a lot of deals with our suppliers to help them with prepayment and more comfortable payment options, to allow them to survive this period.”

There’s plenty of room for expansion in Bookaway’s case. Like many travel-tech companies, the Group managed to grow during travel’s lowest slump by discovering new markets, acquiring other service providers, and tapping into localised demographics.

The Group currently boasts 7000+ operators across 9975 cities, and yet with all that momentum, Omer says the company is more interested in quality over quantity and isn’t too concerned about increasing the number of operators in the coming year. 

“It’s going to be much slower because we’re focusing on getting the business back post-Covid and scaling really, really fast with our existing operators. There’s still a lot of potential in the current 7000 operators and we’re focused on optimising those rather than adding more coverage.”

Big company, startup mindset

On that same spectrum, Bookaway is dealing with the technological gap faced by many service providers in the travel space. Contrary to popular belief, travel isn’t a universally tech-driven industry. Many tour and transport operators, bus and ferry companies, and even train services, are either still offline or online in a fragmented sense i.e. their network isn’t connected to the bigger OTAs. 

What’s interesting is how Bookaway is tackling this challenge – by developing a system that isn’t exclusive to their brand.

According to Omer, “In the last year, we developed a new service called seatOS – it’s a software that we bring to our operators complementary to our online service. It allows them to go online not just with Bookaway but every other competitor online that wants to connect with them. It’s a comprehensive system that allows them to manage their entire operation and sell online. We develop this technology, we provide it to our operators, and we intend in 2023 to really accelerate this strategy of pushing this system to our operators in order to serve our clients by providing them these online capabilities.”

A major takeaway from my chat with Omer Chehmer is how, despite growing in such size and scale, Bookaway as an entity seems to remain agile and scrappy, in the most positive sense. Last year, CEO Noam Toister underlined the fact that the company needed to innovate or risk going out of business. ““When the pandemic hit, our business went to near zero,” recalled Toister. “We thought it’d last three to six months but then we realised it was going to be a two to three-year thing. We looked around and realised it was an opportunity to consolidate.”

Fast forward to the start of 2023, and the company is juggling Top 10 lists and bracing for a surge of tourists in the coming year. 

“If you’re familiar with our story, we always see [challenges] as an opportunity. 2023 represents a lot of economical challenges from a global point of view. Everyone speaks about recession, about money not moving to new investments, and this could affect the prices in travel and [discourage] people from actually travelling, but in the last 3 years what I learned is that… the anxiety of travel never ends. People always want to travel. We think it represents an opportunity to do more consolidation in the market, and that’s actually good for the client, good for the traveller. Because we’ll be much more efficient, only the strong will stay and we’ll be able to provide a much better service to our travellers.”