With this acquisition, VRG plans to expand its tour packages business to Southeast Asia
Venture Republic Group (VRG), a Japanese online tour packages group, has acquired Singapore-based Flocations, an online marketplace for tour packages in Southeast Asia, for an undisclosed sum.
VRG’s packages business in Japan with its brands such Travel.jp and Hotels.jp have made Flocations an ideal target for its expansion plans in the growing tour packages industry of Southeast Asia, VRG said in a statement.
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Post the acquisition, Flocations will maintain its regular operations while aggressively pursuing new commercial partners in the region. As part of the deal, Flocations’ Co-founders Tudor Coman, Venkatraman Dhamodaran, Shaw Chian will be joining VRG.
“The Flocations team has always impressed me with their innovative approach to travel discovery. Their current business is very much in sync with ours,” said Kei Shibata, CEO of VRG, who sits on Flocations’ board of directors.
Founded in 2012 by Coman, Dhamodaran and Chian, along with Florian Cornu, Flocations positioned itself as the Expedia for full-blown tour packages. Working closely with over 80 tour and travel agencies in Singapore and Indonesia, Flocations amassed 8,000 tour packages into it’s searchable marketplace with operations in Singapore and Indonesia.
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“Southeast Asia will be the largest travel market in the world in the next five years and Flocations is extremely excited it will be there with VRG, ” said Coman, CEO of Flocations.
VRG runs Travel.jp, a portal that lets users search over one million travel products such as airfares, hotels and tour packages offered by hundreds of travel suppliers around the world as well as over 7,000 online travel guides. Hotel.jp is an hotels booking portal.
Southeast Asia’s dynamic economies, powered by a rising middle class, are strengthening regional travel. According to a report by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) in 2013, the region posted the highest growth among Asian sub-regions, with 9 per cent arrivals, largely due to continued strong intra-regional demand.
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