Society Pass Founder Dennis Nguyen
NusaTrip, a Jakarta-based online travel agency and a unit of Nasdaq-listed Society Pass Inc. (SoPa), has acquired the Vietnamese online B2B hotel platform VLeisure.
The financial details remain undisclosed.
With this, NusaTrip gains an operational foothold to expand its B2C and B2B businesses in Vietnam. At the same time, VLeisure will leverage SoPa’s capital and NusaTrip’s technology to market its hotel management SaaS products to small-to-medium-sized hotels initially in Vietnam and then to the rest of Southeast Asia.
VLeisure Founder and MD Phan Le commented: “With SoPa’s rapid growth in 2021 and 2022 and NusaTrip’s position as a leading IATA-licensed travel platform in Indonesia, VLeisure now is able to access our parent companies’ infrastructure of capital, technology, marketing, and customer support, allowing VLeisure to better serve our Vietnam-based customers and accelerate growth in our hotel business. VLeisure’s trip planning, booking capabilities, and hotel technology expertise complements Nusatrip’s existing travel services to deliver a more personalised user experience.”
NusaTrip will continue to acquire online and offline travel agencies in Southeast Asia as it builds a regional travel platform servicing the booming SEA travel market.
Founded in 2011 in Ho Chi Minh City, VLeisure is an online marketplace for hotels, airlines, and travel agencies, empowering regional and international OTAs by distributing their travel products. It claims to have an inventory of over 650,000 registered hotels. VLeisure also services small-to-medium-size hotels with customer booking and revenue collection software solutions.
Founded in 2013, NusaTrip has over 1.2 million registered users, 500 airlines and 200,000 hotels connected with over 80 million unique visitors.
The VLeisure acquisition comes at an opportune time for NusaTrip with the dramatic rebound in the SEA travel market from the depths of the Covid pandemic.
According to Web In Travel, gross bookings in 2025 will reach 94 per cent of the record 2019 levels. And according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, the tourism sector expects to welcome 110 million tourist arrivals in 2023, valued at US$27 billion, representing 5.7 per cent of Vietnam’s projected 2023 GDP of US$469 billion.
Founded in 2018, SoPa is a data-driven loyalty, fintech and e-commerce ecosystem in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. It is an acquisition-focused holding company operating six interconnected verticals (loyalty, digital media, travel, telecoms, lifestyle, and F&B.
Besides NusaTrip and VLeisure, SoPa operates Thoughtful Media Group (Thailand), Gorilla Networks (Singapore), Leflair.com (Vietnam), Handycart.vn (Vietnam); and Mangan.ph (Philippines).
Society Pass completed an IPO and began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SOPA in November 2021.
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