How Traveloka plans to conquer the $150b travel experiences market

Indonesian unicorn Traveloka has launched a new feature that lets users discover travel-related activities and attractions and book them through its website and app.

According to the company, about 15,000 selections are currently available for booking on Traveloka Xperience. These include tickets to music concerts and theme parks like Universal Studios Singapore, as well as activities like whitewater rafting in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, or a guided tour to the Tiger Beer brewery in the Lion City. Users can also purchase essentials like foreign SIM cards.

“We believe that the strongest moments people experience while they travel are the things that they do at the destination,” says Christian Suwarna, CEO of Traveloka Xperience.

Traveloka Xperience CEO Christian Suwarna (second from left) at the launch event / Photo credit: Traveloka

This marks Traveloka’s first major product expansion since it introduced accommodations in 2015, and it’s entering a space considered to be a major growth sector in the travel industry. That said, Suwarna says the market may be even bigger than people think.

For many, traveling means going somewhere far away or somewhere they don’t visit often, he says. “But we want to argue that to discover a new place, you don’t necessarily have to go far away. You can be a local tourist.”

Digitizing an offline, fragmented industry

While Xperience has enjoyed “perhaps the fastest growth” among Traveloka’s products, according to Suwarna, it’s not entirely new. Instead, it’s a rebrand and evolution of what used to be called Attraction and Activities, which existed for about two years – time that was spent developing and fine-tuning this feature, he says.

While users during the so-called incubation period were mainly Indonesian, Xperience has been on a “soft roll-out” in the seven countries where Traveloka operates – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Australia – since the beginning of this year.

Initially, the most popular product among users was theme park tickets – a “rational and predictable” pattern, notes Suwarna – but that has changed. Users have started booking activities like concert, yoga classes and cooking sessions, as well as more specialized day trips like catching the sunrise at East Java’s Mount Bromo or a boat ride around Bali.

He adds that once users understand how the platform works, their confidence in it starts to build. “Then they explore more and more activities and start looking at those that are more off the beaten path.”

Traveloka works with partners – theme parks, tour agencies, and others – mainly on a direct contract basis. The business model is simple, according to Suwarna. Traveloka offers Xperience partners access to what he calls “core assets:” its user base, discoverability on the Traveloka platform, and ease of booking.

Listing itself is free, but the company takes a commission out of every booking. Suwarna declined to disclose the exact percentage, but he shares that it’s closer to how much it charges for accommodation, which is higher than how much it charges for flights.

To ensure the quality of its partners’ offerings, Traveloka only teams up with legal entities – they must either be a limited partnership or a limited company, at least. Unlike Airbnb’s Experiences, the Indonesian startup doesn’t work with individual operators because it makes quality control harder, though Suwarna says Traveloka is looking to do this eventually.

Leveraging the Traveloka ecosystem