Articles tagged “softbank”

It's clear that Oyo will try to go public in some fashion. But will investors buy the story — and the shares?

Putting the “American Express” back into American Express Global Business Travel, its new Neo1 expense tool reminds us the world’s biggest corporate travel agency is half-owned by a credit card company.

It's official and improbable. The South Korean startup Yanolja considers itself a triple threat to hotel tech sellers like Oracle Hospitality, online agencies like Hopper, and mid-market hospitality brands like Sonder. Can it really succeed in all three?

Yanolja means “Hey, let’s play” in Korean. If Softbank agrees to play, the travel startup will have the capital to go on an acquisitions spree to bolster its global reach. That way it will be more likely to have a successful public listing in the U.S. later.

The online travel industry focuses on every move or utterance from Airbnb and its CEO Brian Chesky. Not that Booking Holdings is an after-thought these days, but before Airbnb there was Priceline, Booking.com, and the Group's boss, Jeffery Boyd. Building blocks, certainly.

Klook is winning investor confidence during the pandemic. The online agency is tapping into domestic leisure spending in several Asian markets while aspiring to copy some moves from Chinese superapp Meituan by providing more business-to-business services, too.

Will soundbites like "Zoom parties every day, every night" and other headline-grabbing quotes influence perceptions of the value of business travel, or do we take them with a pinch of salt?

Latin America's Rappi now offers business travel alongside things like takeaways, pet food and furniture. It doesn’t sound like a winning combination, but different parts of the world have different appetites for digitization.

Numerous travel companies, private and public, have seen their valuations taken down a peg by coronavirus. But Oyo's China business, where it fields about 60 percent of its rooms, and its ongoing operational problems in other regions exacerbate its likely valuation decline.

Oyo appears to be taking its once-explosive global expansion strategy down a few notches, and that could be a good thing for the young company in the face of still-uncertain impacts from the coronavirus and the reputational damage it recently suffered. These losses aren't pretty.