How South Korea’s newest unicorn plans to automate the hotel industry

This article is from an episode of Asia VC Cast, a podcast hosted by Daniel Song. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Yanolja, an online leisure and accommodation booking platform, is the most recent unicorn born and bred in South Korea. It has expanded into global hotel chains, systems, and leisure activities. It’s also on a mission to automate the industry by integrating internet of things and AI into its solutions.

In this episode, Kim Jong-yoon, CEO of online business and corporate strategy at Yanolja, walks us through the company’s journey, vision, and next steps.

Tell us about your background and how you became CEO at Yanolja.

Before Yanolja, I worked at McKinsey & Company as a digital expert at its business technology office. I also worked at Google, where I had experiences in many different areas, from account management to financial analysis and business development.

I joined Yanolja four years ago as a chief strategy officer. To execute the strategy I’ve been building for four years, I moved up to become the CEO who’s in charge of the company’s online business, from software and hardware to systems.

Can you walk us through the company’s journey?

Yanolja used to be a bulletin service for many budget hotels in Korea. At the time, we felt we needed to make a vision happen, which is to provide a kind of service that lets people enjoy their lives. In order to do that, we had to build an online travel agency service with a new platform.

Typically, an online travel agency has a sales office and just provides the inventory to customers. But we wanted to build a platform that serves the overall value chain of businesses in the hotel and leisure industry. So we aggregated all the data and content from hotels in real time, allowing us to have a bigger inventory of about 5,000 hotels. Now this number has increased to more than 20,000.

What enabled Yanolja to grow from a budget hotel aggregator to a comprehensive travel platform?

We focused on two areas: digitized data and “undigitized” data.

In Korea, there’s a lot of digital information on travel and leisure, but most of it is not well-organized. Users are unable to find good content that they’d enjoy. So, we gathered all kinds of digitized information about travel and leisure and categorized them from the users’ perspective.

In terms of undigitized data, we wanted to aggregate data in real time across the value chain to help digitize offline businesses in the industry. In order to do that, we developed our own hardware using IoT and AI. We did this to reflect better content for users.

We are also developing new features, such as AI hotel sensors, to automate hotels. With this, we are looking forward to a new era of an automated hotel industry in the near future.

What’s the opportunity you saw in the leisure activities market?