Yanolja Cloud CEO says goal is to digitalize global hospitality industry

Digitalization is all the rage across all industries, but the global hospitality industry is several steps behind, known for its still-conservative ways of using internal analog systems for operations.

Yanolja Cloud co-CEO Lee Jun-young poses for a photo during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on June 15 at Yanolja's office in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. [YANOLJA CLOUD]

Digitalization is all the rage across all industries, but the global hospitality industry is several steps behind, known for its still-conservative ways of using internal analog systems for operations.

Yanolja Cloud co-CEO Lee Jun-young is trying to disrupt that, gearing up for a digital boom in the industry with its cloud-based services.

"It is extremely difficult to find a hotel or a business operator which have fully completed digital transition," Lee said in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at Yanolja's office in southern Seoul. "And when we say that a hotel has completed its digital transition, it does not mean that it just implemented a few solutions but has formed an integrated digital space where data can circulate smoothly. But this industry is surprisingly slow when it comes to change. There still exists hotels that fill out reservation forms by hand, even if they are listed on [business-to-consumer] platforms such as Booking.com and Agoda."

Yanolja is known to most Koreans as an accommodation reservation app. But globally, Yanolja saw the potential to break into the global market to provide hospitality solutions such as property management system (PMS), the software that hotels use to manage all of its properties from reservations to housekeeping; channeling manager (CM), a software that links the PMS to all the platforms the hotel is on for consumers to check the availabilities and details of the rooms across all platforms; and booking engine (BE), a software as a service (SaaS) which allows guests to reserve a property via hotel's website and social media channels.

After Yanolja secured a $1.7-billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund in July 2021, Yanolja Cloud, a wholly owned subsidiary of Yanolja, is expanding its global portfolio through acquisitions this year as the Covid-19 pandemic nears the end.

In April, the company acquired U.S. hospitality software company Innsoft for $8.3 million to get a foothold in the North American market. The following month, it acquired Go Global Travel (GGT), an Israel-based business-to-business travel search engine platform that has more than 1 million global hospitalities listed on its platform. It was "the largest-scale" purchase ever made by the company, although the details were not disclosed.

Yanolja Cloud also recruited Lee Jun-young, who became co-CEO of Yanolja Cloud in April. Lee came to the company in May 2022 as executive vice president of engineering. Before Yanolja Cloud, Lee was the first Korean engineer to join Google and led the establishment of Google Korea's research and development center. Lee had worked at Samsung Electronics and Yahoo Korea before Google.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How is Yanolja Cloud planning to utilize its acquired companies?A.We now have a full global portfolio to expand overseas. If this is a 100-meter sprint, we are at the starting line, poised to run the minute the gun blasts.

Although Yanolja Cloud always aimed to go overseas, it would take us too long if we started on our own. Recently-acquired GGT will provide expertise on channel management in Europe, as it possesses over 1 million data inventories on hotels and travel products across 200 countries, with more than 20,000 clients.

Innsoft, on the other hand, will act as a bridgehead to enter the North American market.

Hospitality solutions vary continent by continent and country by country. The solutions we currently provide to clients in 170 countries are adjusted or customized from the onset to reflect the physical and cultural differences of properties. Our acquired companies and their global branches will help reflect those differences even better in our future solutions.

Yanolja Cloud co-CEO Lee Jun-young speaks in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on June 15 at Yanolja's office in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. [YANOLJA CLOUD]

As you said, the tourism industry is very conservative and slow to change. Why do you believe that people will use solutions developed by Yanolja Cloud? It’s not going to be easy. No matter how good the system is, change is difficult for the industry because that’s how they’ve been running for decades, and they believe that there have been no major problems so far.

But even if they refuse to go with the flow, everything is changing to the phase in which they have to accept the trend. And there’s a bigger reason the industry will adopt digital solutions — and it’s a simple yet basic one — minimizing the costs and maximizing profits.

Utilizing channel management solutions will sell more rooms as the properties are exposed to more platforms, and property management solutions will reduce costs spent on human resources.

For instance, our recently-launched “Y Kiosk,” co-developed with Samsung Electronics, directly links the hotel’s PMS to the Kiosk in real-time. From the moment customers check into the hotel — without needing to deal with the front desk — the room status is instantly updated on the hotel’s PMS, offering a more systematic and efficient customer management and on-site staff operation.

I know Kiosks are still a rare sight to see overseas compared to Seoul, but our clients would see them differently when they see reduced labor costs.

HR management is not cheap, especially overseas, and Yanolja Cloud can offer easy solutions to such problems.

You said that Google and Yanolja are similar. In what ways? They are both companies who changed or trying to change the world with massive amounts of data they’ve accumulated over the years.

Google’s mission is to make all the information in the world accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere and ultimately, to change the world. Yanolja, on the other hand, has a colossal amount of travel data it has accumulated for decades, which becomes the foundation for a company to change the world. How we utilize that data is up to us, but it’s rare to find a company with such heaps of data.

Yanolja Cloud co-CEO Lee Jun-young speaks in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on June 15 at Yanolja's office in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. [YANOLJA CLOUD]

How are you bringing your experience from Google to Yanolja Cloud? I've worked for Google for about 20 years and gained countless precious experiences that make me feel like I saved a country in my previous life.

For a long time, I've been wanting to bring Google's technology, its work process and communication process to the domestic IT industry and when I met with Yanolja founder Lee Su-jin, I was convinced of Yanolja and Yanolja Cloud's potential succeed overseas.

I've been here for over a year now, and I believe I'm changing the work mindset and culture here. I'm trying to adopt the "one-team" structure that Google uses, where all the company's employees, regardless of their position or department, collaborate to solve problems. Although they belong to different divisions and have different tasks, they all work toward the same goal. To achieve that, active communication and sharing of the work process among themselves is crucial.

I'm bringing that work culture from Google to Yanolja Cloud.

What is then Yanolja Cloud's ultimate goal? Millions of properties across the globe remain scattered, not connected. In Korea, that is relatively less felt to the skin because consumers and businesses are sensitive to change and ever-changing trends. But globally, even U.S. clients are far behind in digitalization, which is preposterous. From Yanolja Cloud's perspective, however, this is an opportunity and an area where we can play a big role.

Digitalizing an industry is easier said than done, but with the dataset and the software we have, we send innovative solutions out to the world and receive data in return, creating a virtuous cycle in the global industry.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]