HotelQuickly brings last-minute bookings to South Korea, its 15th country

Being one of the world’s top tourist destinations – and a new favorite for Chinese tourists – it’s a surprise that HotelQuickly took as long as it did to arrive in South Korea. With today’s announcement, the last-minute hotel booking app is finally available for travelers heading to Seoul, Busan, Kyungsan, Ulsan, Daegu, and Jeju Island, with more areas to be added in the near future.

The app’s launch in South Korea – its 15th country to date – coincides with the launch of a bunch of added features and a spanking-new look, which co-founder and CTO Michal Juhas claims will make “last-minute hotel booking not only more intuitive, but visually exciting as well.” The startup is based in Hong Kong.

“We had people from every department hitting the streets beta-testing the new version to find out what people around Asia-Pacific really think of both the process and look,” he adds. “We’ve taken all of this research back to our designers and developers to create a truly stunning new version.”

“We saw a huge potential in Korea because of the high smartphone penetration rate and proximity to other HotelQuickly markets,” says Raphael Cohen, HotelQuickly’s co-founder and CSO.

Why then did HotelQuickly take so long to arrive? CEO and co-founder Tomas Laboutka explains:

While Korea is an extremely important market to us, we never wanted to rush into South Korea for the sake of being there alone. We wanted to introduce HotelQuickly to South Korea when we knew we had a service Koreans would truly love, and now we’re confident that this will really resonate with South Korean travelers.

The 15 countries that HotelQuickly is currently in continue to miss out another huge tourist destination – Japan. Laboutka reveals that they are not going to enter anytime soon. This might raise a few eyebrows since its major investor, Gree, is a Japanese company, and Laboutka recently became a board member of Gree’s own hotel booking service, Tonight. HotelQuickly’s CEO says that there will be “close collaboration [between HotelQuickly and Gree]. We’re working to see the success of both companies.”

It’s been about half a year since Gree led a US$4.5 million funding round in the travel startup, and Laboutka claims that HotelQuickly has seen double-digit growth in terms of revenue, but declined to reveal specific numbers. He adds that there have been acquisition offers and that the founders are “keeping an open mind.”