The travel industry in South Korea is on the rise. With the rise of Korean culture regarding Kpop, entertainment, fashion, and beauty, an estimated 16 million international tourists arrived in South Korea in 2023. Most of these travelers came from China, Japan, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Therefore, Korean travel startups have had much success leading up to 2024.
Many startups in Korea are looking to bring a transformation in the travel industry to South Korea. Many Korean startups are looking to disrupt the travel/hospitality space, and the most promising ones are listed below.
Yanolja has incorporated new technologies such as AI, IoT, and VR into traditional lodging and leisure industries for the first time in Korea. They have already acquired travel companies such as Dable, an ad tech company; Interpark, a B2C eCommerce platform; DailyHotel, an online and mobile reservation site for hotels; Indian Hotel Tech firm eZee; and ZEN Rooms, a Southeast Asian budget hotel chain. Moreover, to further target the Southeast Asian market, Yanolja has partnered with Bnetworks. Bnetworks is an IoT company in Malaysia. They will collaborate to create a cloud-based hotel management solution that connects data across all services.
Yanolja Cloud is Yanolja’s cloud-based hospitality solution that offers B2B solutions for hotels. It is called Y FLUX, and it is a fully automated hotel management solution. Yanolja plans to drive the digital transformation of hotels, leisure, and residential spaces worldwide with this solution. The cloud solution will be able to satisfy the needs of partners, booking channels, and customers.
Japan-based Korean Hospitality startup H2O Hospitality is an online and offline integrated hospitality management group focused on supporting lodging companies like hotels in the Korean and Japanese markets. They provide integrated solutions for managing facilities, such as reservation management, housekeeping, cleaning, facility management, and customer call service for hostels, guest houses, and hotels. The startup has been on the rise due to the pandemic as there has been a rise in demand for contactless and staffless operations at hotels.
H2O Hospitality provides full-scale accommodation management solutions with its cleaning helper platform WaHome. Its integrated hotel management system can reduce a hotel’s management fees by 50% and increase revenue by 30%. They completed their Series C round for $30 million, led by Kakao Investment, Korea Development Bank, Gorilla Private Equity, Intervest, and NICE Investment. To date, they have raised a total of $45 million.
H2O currently operates 8,000 accommodations, including hotels, ryokans, and guest houses in Tokyo, Seoul, Busan, Osaka, and Bangkok.
“H20 Hospitality is currently speaking with several global hotel chain companies to partner with their digital transformation and operation outside of Korea and Japan,” said the CEO of H2O Hospitality John Lee.
Yeogi Eottae is a South Korean online hotel and mobile ticket booking service from With Innovation that made the news for accepting cryptocurrencies as payment on their platform. They have teamed up with cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb to create a payment platform. Therefore, cryptocurrency payments include Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ripple.
Yeogi Eottae bought MangoPlate to bring restaurant content onto its platform. MangoPlate is a restaurant recommendation platform with over 200,000 restaurants on its database. They are known for their curation by using AI technology to filter out fake reviews. The acquisition comes after Yeogi Eottae received feedback from its users who wanted a restaurant curation and reservation service on the platform.
Korean startup NomadHer developed an app of the same name that helps women enjoy solo trips around the world without the need to worry. The app is for solo female travelers that offers information about safety and sanitary concerns when booking where to stay at night. In addition, the app allows female travelers to find other female travelers.
All listings have reviews written by women, and there is a community section where female travelers can share their travel stories. They partnered with the Seoul Tourism Foundation and have expanded to London and Paris.
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