Asia is the centre of gravity in global travel tech, and 2026 is its year of reckoning by IPO. The region’s giant, China’s Trip.com Group, posted $8.9 billion in revenue in 2025, with international bookings up around 60% (Trip.com). Behind it, a wave of Asian travel platforms is racing to the public markets — Klook filed for a New York IPO, OYO is preparing a fresh listing, and Traveloka is weighing one at $5–6 billion. The Asia-Pacific travel market is on track for $555 billion by 2027 and growing faster than any other region (Phocuswright). After the pandemic nearly killed it, Asian travel tech is back — and going public.
How big is Asia’s travel market?
The largest and fastest-growing on earth. Phocuswright puts the total Asia-Pacific travel market on a path to $555 billion by 2027 at a 7% compound growth rate — outpacing every other region. The recovery is real but uneven: Asia-Pacific arrivals reached 331 million in 2025, up 6%, but still about 9% below 2019, making it the one major region not yet fully recovered (UN Tourism).
The most interesting shift is who’s travelling. Intra-ASEAN travel rose from 37% of Southeast Asia’s international arrivals in 2019 to 45% in 2024 — Asians, not Westerners, are now driving the regional boom. And Chinese outbound travel has roughly recovered to its 2019 trip volume of around 155 million, though spending remains about 28% below pre-COVID levels. The comeback is in bodies, not yet in wallets.
How big is Trip.com Group?
It’s the Asian travel giant, and the world’s third-largest online travel company by market value. Trip.com Group — which owns Ctrip and Qunar in China, the international Trip.com brand, and the metasearch engine Skyscanner — generated 62.4 billion yuan (about $8.9 billion) in 2025, up 17%, with international OTA bookings surging around 60% (Trip.com). It’s the booking platform of choice for nearly 69% of Chinese travellers.
One number needs a caveat. Trip.com’s headline 2025 net profit nearly doubled to 33.4 billion yuan — but over half of that was one-off investment gains; core profit excluding those gains was around 13.4 billion yuan. The underlying business is strong and growing internationally, but the “doubled profit” headline is partly an accounting artifact. Even so, at roughly $47 billion in market value, Trip.com is the clear number three globally — though still less than a third the size of Booking Holdings, which says a lot about how much runway the Asian giant still has.
Who leads travel tech in Southeast Asia?
A crowded, consolidating field. Traveloka, the Indonesian super-app and Southeast Asia’s largest home-grown OTA, is weighing an IPO at a $5–6 billion valuation, backed by GIC, the Qatar Investment Authority and Expedia. Agoda, part of Booking Holdings and headquartered in Singapore with major Bangkok operations, is the region’s quiet heavyweight. And Klook, the Hong Kong-based experiences and activities platform, filed for a New York IPO in late 2025 after hitting $3.04 billion in gross bookings and its first positive adjusted EBITDA — a knife-edge profitability story timed to the listing.
Underneath the consumer giants sits a less visible but fast-growing layer of travel infrastructure and niche platforms. Hotel-software firms like Zuzu Hospitality — a property-management system for mid-sized Asian hotels, now serving close to 3,000 properties — digitise the long tail of independent hotels the big OTAs don’t reach. Korea’s Tripbtoz blends social-media travel discovery with hotel booking and became one of the first Asian OTAs listed on ChatGPT, an early bet on agentic travel. And micro-stay platforms like ByHours, which lets travellers book hotel rooms in 3, 6 or 24-hour blocks, are carving out new booking models entirely. The experiences boom is the segment to watch. Tours, activities and attractions — long the fragmented, offline corner of travel — are digitising fast, and Klook is Asia’s champion of it, alongside the now-profitable European player GetYourGuide. At the more specialised end, platforms like TripGuru connect travellers directly with local tour guides and experiences across Asia, digitising the fragmented, guide-led corner of the market that the big booking engines underserve. For the payments rails that power all this booking, see our Asia digital payments tracker.
What is happening with OYO and India’s travel tech?
India is the other major arena, and OYO is its rollercoaster. The SoftBank-backed budget-hotel platform chased a $12 billion valuation at its peak, then prepared a fresh IPO targeting $7–8 billion — a 35–40% haircut — yet posted its first full-year profit of around 623 crore rupees the same year. Valuation down, fundamentals up: it’s the defining arc of the post-boom correction.
Around it, India’s online travel market is led decisively by MakeMyTrip, with over half the market and record FY25 gross bookings of $9.8 billion. The newer listed player ixigo IPO’d in 2024, oversubscribed nearly 100 times. India is a market where the OTAs are genuinely profitable — a contrast to the cash-burning growth era — and where the next wave of travel-tech listings is concentrated.
What about Japan and Korea?
The two North Asian markets are where the travel boom is most visible — and most lucrative. Japan had a record 42.7 million international visitors in 2025, up 15.8% and roughly 10 million above its pre-pandemic peak, powered by a weak yen that made the country irresistibly cheap for foreign travellers (Japan National Tourism Organization). South Korea (9.5 million) and China (9.1 million) led the arrivals. That inbound surge has lifted everything from hotel-booking platforms to the experiences and restaurant-reservation apps that serve a flood of first-time visitors — and strained against an ageing tourism workforce that’s leaning hard on automation and AI translation.
South Korea’s travel tech has a genuine champion in Yanolja, the country’s only travel-tech unicorn. It began as a budget-accommodation booking app and built outward into a full travel-and-leisure super-app, then a global B2B travel-technology company — its enterprise-solutions arm grew revenue around 62% in 2024, and it consolidated its consumer brands (including Interpark Triple) into a unified platform called NOL Universe. Yanolja is the clearest example of an Asian travel company doing what Trip.com did at smaller scale: turning a domestic booking app into a technology business that sells the plumbing to everyone else.
How is AI changing travel?
The frontier is shifting from search to agentic booking — AI that doesn’t just show options but plans and books the trip. Trip.com’s AI assistant, TripGenie, saw AI-assisted order volume grow around 400% year on year, handling end-to-end itineraries across flights, hotels and activities. Industry data suggests a majority of travellers now use some AI tool during booking, up sharply from a few years ago.
A new layer of travel-data and agentic startups is emerging to feed that shift — companies like Zytlyn, which runs a travel-demand predictions platform letting airlines, airports and OTAs build autonomous agents on its proprietary data (disclosure: also a Velocity Ventures portfolio company). Where this goes is the same place every consumer vertical is heading: the algorithm stops being a search box and becomes the agent that decides. For Asia’s travel platforms, the prize is owning that agent layer before a Google or an OpenAI does — which is exactly why Trip.com is investing so heavily in TripGenie. For the broader pattern of AI intermediating commerce, see our analysis of how AI is reshaping Asian markets.
Frequently asked questions
How big is Trip.com Group?
Trip.com Group generated 62.4 billion yuan (about $8.9 billion) in revenue in 2025, up 17%, making it the world’s third-largest online travel company by market value (~$47 billion). It owns Ctrip, Qunar, the international Trip.com brand and Skyscanner.
What is the largest travel market in Asia?
The Asia-Pacific travel market is the world’s largest and fastest-growing, on track for about $555 billion by 2027 at a 7% compound growth rate (Phocuswright). Arrivals reached 331 million in 2025 but remain ~9% below 2019.
Is Traveloka going public?
As of 2026, Traveloka — Southeast Asia’s largest home-grown online travel company — is weighing an IPO at a $5–6 billion valuation and considering a dual listing, but has set no firm date. It is backed by GIC, the Qatar Investment Authority and Expedia. (Note: Traveloka is independent, not owned by Sea Group.)
What happened to OYO’s valuation?
OYO chased a $12 billion valuation at its SoftBank-era peak, then prepared a fresh IPO targeting $7–8 billion — a 35–40% reduction — while posting its first full-year profit of around 623 crore rupees, signalling improved fundamentals despite the lower valuation.
Which Asian travel companies are going public in 2026?
A wave of listings: Klook filed for a New York IPO after reaching its first positive adjusted EBITDA, OYO is preparing a fresh filing, Traveloka is weighing one, and ixigo already listed in India in 2024.
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