Southeast Asia is one of the most culturally diverse regions of the world, yet there are still many hidden gems across the region for travellers to discover. One of the reasons for this is the limited promotion of such places; another reason is the lack of a proper platform that guides you through the travel process.

With the increasing interest in travelling amongst people, many travel-related apps and websites have emerged over the years. One such example is Traveloka – a platform that helps you find great hotels and flights at reasonable prices. Traveloka is especially popular in countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia.

What does Traveloka do?

When you’re planning a trip to a lesser-known destination like Cambodia or Myanmar, more often than not, you’re uncertain if the booking platform has the best options for hotels or if you’ve compared enough flights. All these challenges in planning your travels are made easy with Traveloka.

Now that you are intrigued with what it does, let us talk a bit about how Traveloka works. It is a website and mobile application offering hassle-free flight or hotel bookings, with a focus on (but not limited to) Southeast Asia.

The booking platform was founded in 2012 in Jakarta, where its headquarters are located. Both the app and website are currently available across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. If you happen to live in Southeast Asia and need a good flight search and hotel booking platform that provides reasonable prices, Traveloka is definitely for you.

It comes up with regular flight and hotel deals which makes it highly sought-after by both leisure and business travellers.

What is the history of Traveloka?

Don’t get misled with the mention of history, but this booking platform has a great story behind it. The platform was initiated by Ferry Unardi, Albert Zhang and Derianto Kusuma. To be more specific, the idea first struck Derianto, who struggled a lot when he was trying to book flight tickets from where he was studying in the United States back to his home in Indonesia.

Derianto was the one who proposed the idea, which later took shape when all these IT brains came together in their hometown. This is when they decided to develop a website that would make traveling a lot more streamlined and easier. Their primary aim was to focus on the Southeast Asia region, which lacked the resources of proper booking platforms. Thus, Traveloka came to be.

They started off with price comparisons between various flight and hotel operators initially. This later evolved to flight bookings on their website in the year 2013. That quickly escalated to hotel bookings as well in the following year. Since then, they haven’t looked back.

Traveloka started off with 50 employees back in the initial days, but now accounts for over 2,000 employees who work from various countries within Southeast Asia. The first seed funding that the company received was from East Venture in the year 2012 itself. With the growing popularity, they launched their application on both iOS and Android operating systems. The website bagged their first award, rather two awards in the year 2015.

The success rate of this company hasn’t slowed since then and has only escalated over time. Following the launch of their application, it was downloaded by 10 million users by the end of 2016. Apart from the flight and hotel bookings, they later introduced train bookings and hotel packages within Indonesia in the year 2017. They gained so much popularity that they sponsored ‘Asia’s Got Talent’ in 2017 successfully. Their list of growth plans are never-ending, and more such integrations are set to be done in the coming years.

Features of Traveloka

Traveloka ensures to cater to ever-changing customer needs. Their changes are implemented by constantly evaluating their customers’ needs, thus helping the company grow and serving the customers by giving what they want. Some of the common services offered by Traveloka include:

· Flight booking

· Train booking

· Flight and hotel packages

· Hotel booking

· Mobile top-up and data packages

· Several other bill payments

Apart from these standard features, they offer easy bookings to different destinations, and users can choose from a variety of options before they finally choose the cheapest and most suitable one for them. Not just that, they have also partnered up with some airlines to provide with cheapest fare to users.

Their extensive hotel inventory, along with the trust they have sown in their customers’ mind, make it one of the most opted for booking platforms across Southeast Asia.

About the app

As mentioned, the Traveloka app was launched back in 2014 for both the iOS and Android platforms. The app initially had a very basic interface which has now evolved into a much more interactive one. It is the simple layout along with the interactive graphics that make it shine from its contemporaries.

The app provides the users with some discount coupons and offers which are amazing. Another good thing about this website is the fact that it has an auto-fill option which lets a person book their tickets in under a minute. It has a 24-hour multilingual help centre, as it is primarily operated from Indonesia.

All in all, if you are planning your next trip to any of the Southeastern countries, it is time to let Traveloka do the job. You can effectively get hold of the cheapest tickets and fares which can help you save your hard-earned money. It has been awarded for several of its achievements and all for the right reasons. So, if you are planning your next trip, try using Traveloka and you won’t be disappointed!

Affordable travel in Southeast Asia with Traveloka