 "Booming Japan tourism and cheap Vietnamese engineers made this start-up a $175 mn success")
If you’ve ever booked a flight or vacation package in Japan, there’s a good chance you did it through Evolable Asia – though you may not know it. The Tokyo-based start-up, founded in 2007, runs three popular online travel portals of its own— Tripstar (multiple language portal site, both domestic and international flights and hotels), Soratabi (domestic flight search), and Tabiweb (overseas hotel booking). An additional 600 domestic travel sites use its in-house technology to power their own flight, hotel, and tour package searches.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are just around the corner, and the government is pushing for 20 million annual tourists to touch down in Japan. By then, Evolable Asia, is also gunning to become a regional facilitator of inbound tourism to Japan. It hopes to scale its Japan-specific travel search engine to partners across Asia Pacific, helping foreigners not only get to Japan, but travel domestically after they land.
Lessons learned while setting up an engineering team at its Vietnamese subsidiary inspired founder and CEO Hideki Yoshimura to launch a seemingly unrelated but successful offshore web and app development business in 2012. He’s now eyeing US expansion.
“If online travel companies in APAC want to create Japan-focused travel services, we can provide the search engine and the engineering team,” he tells Tech in Asia. “Our clients only need money – we create everything.”
