Taipei-based travel start-up KKday has closed its latest US$75 million funding round, helped by a pivot to domestic package tours after the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the global tourism industry this year.
The Series C funding was led by the Taiwanese government’s National Development Fund and the Tokyo-based Cool Japan Fund, while existing investors, including Monk’s Hill Ventures and MindWorks Capital, also participated.
KKday, which previously focused on offering ground package tours at foreign destinations, saw sales plunge 90 percent to hit rock bottom in March, but its shift to domestic tourists has since paid off, founder and CEO Ming Chen (陳明明) said in an interview.
“We were able to secure new funding because investors saw that we acted swiftly and that we were able to execute changes during a crisis,” the 47-year-old Chen said. “Taiwan’s domestic travel began to rebound in May and it exploded in late June. We saw sales from domestic travel in Taiwan grow five times from the same period of last year in July and August.”
With the government mobilizing quickly in the early days of the outbreak, Taiwan has kept COVID-19 cases to less than 600 and only reported seven virus-related deaths among a population of about 24 million.
Some domestic tourist spots have seen visitor numbers surge this year, a contrast with the struggles elsewhere.
A July report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development showed that the US$1.7 trillion global tourism industry is forecasting annual losses of up to 80 percent, while airlines around the world have said that they need as much as US$200 billion in bailouts.
Other markets that KKday operates in — including Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea — have seen a similar rise in domestic travel, Chen said.
Sales at the company, which was founded in 2014 and has more than 5 million users, could return to about the same level as last year toward the end of this year, he added.
Even in the post-COVID-19 world, people will continue to take trips as leisure travel is a “rigid demand,” Chen said.
However, they might choose shorter flights over longer ones, and prefer trips with fewer companions over traditional tour groups that squeeze a large number of people onto buses, he said, which creates opportunities for his business.
KKday is planning premium offerings such as yacht trips for those with high spending power who are stranded at home.
The start-up plans to use the funds raised to expand a platform called Rezio that helps suppliers, particularly those in Southeast Asia, digitize their services, Chen said.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary