How this Thai startup helps the local travel industry go digital

Far Leeathiwat, co-founder and CEO of Tourkrub

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Far Leeathiwat is the co-founder and CEO of Tourkrub. It is a two-year-old Thailand-based travel technology company that helps tour operators get digital and makes searching for tours easier for travelers.

In this interview, Leeathiwat talks about the pain point he discovered, how he built relationships with tour operators, and how he plans to transition from retail to platform in the future.

Please introduce yourself.

I’m Far Leeathiwat, the CEO of Tourkrub. I’m a programmer, and I studied industrial engineering. I have been working on travel technology companies for five years now, and Tourkrub is my latest company.

We have seen a lot of problems in the travel industry in Thailand, and we believe that it is still very traditional. We’d like to bring tours to the digital era.

Tell us more about the pain point you’re addressing.

Thailand is a very popular travel destination in Southeast Asia. It’s already advanced in terms of flight and hotel bookings, but it still lags behind when it comes to tours.

Companies operate manually and people still purchase tours offline. It takes them a long time before they can discover the right package. They normally have to go to travel expos, visit many websites (which look very crappy), or read newspapers to find travel agencies, which is not efficient. Sometimes, they even get ripped off. And that’s how we saw the opportunity to make the sector better.

We started off with outbound tours, as they’re systematic already. It was also easier for us to advertise to the Thais first. Later on, we began focusing on domestic and inbound tours.

How did you go about building a tech company in Thailand?

The majority of the population has 4G connectivity already, which is cheaper compared to most countries in Southeast Asia. They are connected through their mobile devices, and they hardly use laptops to purchase anything.

Tourkrub has a tag where we can digitize travel itineraries for tour operators. With that, users can view them, including the photos, online.

For example, there are over 200 tours available in Japan and, traditionally, a traveler would have to go through each of them. With Tourkrub, they can go onto our website and easily search from the tours listed on the platform.

On the operators’ side, we connect their back-end inventory to us.

How do you make money on the platform?

We take a commission from every sale. It’s free to list tours on our website, but we implement a quality control process to check these tours.

What are your takeaways from the Alibaba eFounders Fellowship?

What are you looking to achieve in the coming years?