Indonesian e-commerce company Blibli.com has acquired a pioneer Online Travel Agents (OTA) in Indonesia, Tiket.com. Blibli.com CEO Kusumo Martanto and co-founder and chief communications officer Gaery Undarsa, the of Tiket.com signed the documents finalising the acquisition recently. At the same event, George Hendrata was appointed Tiket.com’s new CEO.
Since it was founded in 2011, Blibli.com has held on to a vision of expanding its business line through various innovations.
In late 2016, Blibli.com introduced its online travel product category, Blibli Travel. Blibli Travel is a special category section that offers travel products on the Blibli.com website.
Since then, online travel has become one of Blibli.com’s focuses in developing its business due to the size of this market.
“Tiket.com has a good business track record. In a relatively short time, it grew into one of the biggest OTA in Indonesia. It has maintained its focus on customer satisfaction and has been consistent in running its business.
“Moreover, we see that Tiket.com shares many similarities of vision, mission and corporate values with Blibli.com. We expect that this can ease the process of achieving synergy between the two. Based on this consideration, we are confident with this acquisition,” explained Kusumo.
Tiket.com is currently one of the OTA with the biggest inventory of travelling-related and leisure products, namely airline and train tickets, hotel room bookings, car rental, concert tickets.
Tiket.com has partnered with more than 35 international and domestic airlines, and with thousands of domestic and international hotels.
Blibli Travel, newly-developed late last year, now has more than 1,000 travel product variants, including train tickets, hotel vouchers, and entertainment and lifestyle tickets.
Blibli.com partners with various banks offering 0% interest instalment programs and offers a wide array of payment methods to customers.
With the acquisition, Blibli.com is set to become an e-commerce group offering a one-stop shopping experience and added value to its customers.
Business target and plan
“The acquisition process started five months prior. We see this as an opportunity for Tiket.com to grow exponentially, in terms of the plan for synergy and from the point of view of market penetration. Seeing the future potentials and the similar business cultures and vision shared by both companies, we are very excited about the move to become part of Blibli.com” said Gaery.
Blibli.com will provide full support to Tiket.com, both in the share inventory, sales programme, promotion, and social media penetration. Blibli.com will also help strengthen Tiket.com’s team.
“Blibli.com is optimistic that from the business point of view we are looking at organic and non-organic growths which are to reach 2.5 times in the second semester of this year,” explained Kusumo about the target by the company for the second half of 2017.
“With the acquisition, Blibli.com is ready to emerge as the biggest OTA player in the country and to become the only, or the first, B2C e-commerce player in Indonesia whose OTA business offers the most complete variety of travel products,” said Kusumo, who went on to explain that the money for the acquisition was from the internal sources set up by Blibli.com for its business development.
Moving forward, Blibli.com sees no reason not to expand to other categories of products. The company, however, for the time being will concentrate on developing the two e-commerce companies to cater to the traveling and online shopping needs of its domestic and international customers.