Interview – Kei Shibata talks about Travel.jp’s new partnership with LINE
Kei Shibata’s Venture Republic recently announced a partnership with Japan’s leading mobile messaging platform LINE.
Kei Shibata is co-chapter lead of Travel Massive Tokyo and Travel Massive Singapore. His day job is CEO of Venture Republic – which operates Travel.jp and blog-powered accommodation and destination guide website Trip101.
Travel.jp was co-founded in Tokyo in 2011 by Kei Shibata and Kenichi Shibata. It’s a mix of online travel meta-search and content media site, and now attracts over 15 million monthly users – making it the largest metasearch site in Japan.
As an online travel guide, Travel.jp has published over 27,000 online articles to date – generated by 500+ travel bloggers in their network.
This week, Travel.jp announced an investment and partnership with Asian chat-app LINE.
It’s a big deal, so we asked Kei a few questions:
How signifiant is the partnership between LINE and Travel.jp?
LINE is the most popular mobile messaging platform in Japan – many people consider it the equivalent to China’s WeChat for Japan. It is also very popular in Taiwan, Thailand and other Asian countries.
LINE has 75 million monthly users in Japan alone and runs many mobile services across its different verticals. Almost any smartphone user in Japan now uses LINE’s services.
Together with our user base of 15 million monthly users and growing, we aim to become the largest online travel service in Japan.
What is unique about the team at Venture Republic? Will you be growing the team with the investment?
Since our business at Travel.jp is a mix of online travel metasearch and online travel media, our team consists of professionals with various backgrounds in the industry – OTAs, travel agencies, hospitality, technology solutions, content creation and editing, and more.
The most unique part of our team are the 500+ travel bloggers, who create engaging articles for our platform, writing about every single aspect of many destinations, accommodation and local experiences across Japan as well as the rest of world.
The strategic partnership with LINE will definitely lift us up to the next level in regards to our team – both in terms of quantity and quality. As a result, we will be hiring in almost every area of our business (from engineering to design, marketing, sales, editing, and more).
Do you plan on using AI chat assistants to help travelers book travel?
LINE is one of the pioneers in the AI & chatbot space. It would be a natural next step for us to study the opportunities using those technologies, so we’re working to explore this.
Using the AI and chatbot technology on the LINE messaging platform, we can communicate tailored recommendations, provide relevant information as well as options to book.
Here is an example of how these technologies could be integrated into LINE Travel:
Suppose you are at a destination, and you have plans to go hiking but the weather changes and it’s now raining. Knowing where you are, what the weather forecast looks like and what some of the popular things are to do are, we can automatically suggest some alternative activities based on the articles on our platform: “What about going to this museum? How about this restaurant? Here are some articles about them and this is how you can book.”
How do you keep your business thinking like a startup and staying agile?
Here’s my top three tips for travel businesses to stay agile:
- Leadership is key to being nimble.
- Be open to new ideas, listen to smart people (particularly outside the travel industry) and experiment with new ideas.
- Finally, it’s very important to build good teams and to keep traveling.
Thank you for your insights, Kei!
Read a full-depth interview with Kei over on webintravel.com
Connect with Kei and Venture Republic on Travel Massive.
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