If there’s one country in Asia that has been successful in exporting its pop culture, it’s South Korea. Remember Psy and Gangnam Style that took the world by storm? Well, before and after him, there was and is K-pop.
K-soaps are huge and getting huger. There are fans from Bhutan to New York. And Korean beauty brands and products have become as ubiquitous as Shin Ramyun instant noodles.
Jessica Rabbit-meets-Alice in Wonderland at Imperial Boutique Hotel in Seoul
Walk the streets of Seoul and you’ll find pockets of creativity everywhere. The hotel I stayed in, Imperial Palace Boutique Hotel (IP for short), has swings in its lobby, alongside a glittery, silvery, curvaceous girl rabbit bearing arms – Jessica Rabbit-meets-Alice in Wonderland.
The restaurant I went to called Joongsim Bulgyok literally means “Central Song” and the owner brings in fresh ingredients from around the country to create Korean-fusion cuisine. He does tomato kimchi for instance. And his beef dish is steak tartare meets bulgogi – raw beef marinated in Korean bean sauce and pine nuts and a raw egg is then beaten into the mixture.
You’d expect The Lab Store to sell beauty products, instead it makes the best cinnamon churros I’ve ever tasted.
Scratch that sophisticated, creative surface though and you find a market as complex and complicated as a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
From left, Chris Lee, Booking.com; Wilfred Fan, Agoda; Kei Shibata, Venture Republic and Robin Harries, Trivago
Trivago to take it “piece by piece, step by step”
Which is how Robin Harries, vice president Asia of Trivago, described South Korea during a panel discussion at the first WIT Seoul held last Friday. The Germany-based hotel meta search, which has in its own way taken the world by storm, is making South Korea a top priority in 2016 and Harries said the market has to be approached like a jigsaw puzzle, “piece by piece, step by step”.
It hopes to apply the lessons it’s learnt in Japan to South Korea, which is generally acknowledged to be a few years behind Japan in terms of the evolution of its online travel industry.
Trivago, which recorded US$500 million in revenues in 2015, is growing 60% year on year and is in 55 markets, has seen “hyper growth” in Japan and Harries said its “test and learn” approach has served it well across the 15 markets he’s built for the brand in the region.
As such he’s not too fussed over whether South Korea will develop differently from Japan or other markets. “What’s important is to just do it, test and learn, piece by piece, step by step.”
For example, he said, a lot of people told him that user interface had to be different in South Korea or Japan “because people here like different things”. As it turned out though, the same Trivago interface has worked across all markets.
Meta is the word and dominance by Naver is a concern
Kei Shibata, who runs travel.co.jp, the Japanese meta site, said there is one way that South Korea is developing differently than Japan and that’s in mobile. Shibata, whose company has invested in Korean meta startup, Allstay, said 88.3% of users revisited the Allstay app in one month. “We’ve never seen this kind of figure before.”
The LINE store in Itaewon, all lit up with emoticons
While Kakao is the dominant messaging app in South Korea, it doesn’t seem to be as aggressive as LINE, the Japanese messaging app, whose physical store in Itaewon sells giant, fluffy, furry emoticons throughout the night.
AllStay data also shows an emerging trend among South Korean travellers – a preference for non-traditional accommodation. Up to 30% of bookings through Allstay are for bed & breakfast and inns.
The big trend for 2016 though is meta, evidenced by Trivago’s entry and the debut of local play, AllStay. Skyscanner is seeing good traction in the market and KAYAK is moving in as well.
The big news is the entry of Naver, the country’s “Google”, into travel. Naver’s hotel search is powered by Hotelscombined and it has also entered into a partnership with Booking.com, according to market sources.
Shibata said he was concerned by the entry of Naver into travel meta. “It is unhealthy to have one dominant player, it makes it difficult for other players.”
Agoda high on inbound, Booking.com rides outbound wave
Wilfred Fan, managing director North Asia for Agoda, said there was exciting promise in inbound to South Korea and that the OTA was having bigger success in the inbound market relative to outbound.
One third of travellers to South Korea currently comes from China and Fan said travel suppliers should leverage the global nature of the web to diversity their market mix. Dependence on any one market is not healthy and it also creates a less interesting experience for other visitors if there was one nationality that was dominant, he said.
Fan, who is based in Hong Kong, knows firsthand what over-dependence on one market can mean – with the slowdown in the Chinese market, which accounts for more than half of all visitors to Hong Kong, the SAR has been feeling the pinch in the last 12 months.
Chris Lee, head of partnerships for emerging markets for Booking.com, said he was excited by the outbound potential and that Booking.com, which records 950,000 room nights booked every 24 hours, was seeing healthy growth in Koreans travelling abroad and using its site to book accommodation.
He declined to comment on Booking.com’s partnership with Naver but said the company was interested in pursuing collaborative and productive partnerships. “South Korea is a dynamic market with great promise in digital,” he said.
While all panelists agreed that digital was the new frontier in South Korea’s travel, Shibata observed that the country was “an interesting mix of old economy and new economy” and figuring out how to navigate between the two worlds was the big puzzle.
The audience at the first WIT Seoul
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