Yanolja and Rakuten LIFULL STAY to collaborate in Vacation Rental business

Seoul, South Korea, March 7, 2018 - Yanolja, Corp., one of South Korea’s leading “Online-to-Offline (O2O)” accommodation platform companies, and Rakuten LIFULL STAY, Inc., providing vacation rental services in Japan, today announced that the two companies have agreed to form a strategic business collaboration in the vacation rental business.

This collaboration is Yanolja’s first service expansion outside of South Korea, as well as a strengthening of its wide variety of travel inventories and packages to South Korean business travelers, families and tourists traveling to Japan. In this collaboration, Rakuten LIFULL STAY will provide property listings from its tentatively-titled “Vacation Stay”*1 vacation rental platform to Yanolja, making it possible for Yanolja’s users to reserve vacation rental properties in Japan. The collaboration will also build an exclusive partnership for collaborating on marketing activities aimed at tourists visiting Japan from South Korea.

Yanolja, whose name means “hey, let’s play” in Korean, has 17,000 registered hotels as partners. The popular Yanolja app posted revenue of more than 65 billion won last year and attracted a 60 billion won investment from former Samsung Electronics CEO, Chin Dae-je.

According to data released by the Japan National Tourism Organization*2, the number of travelers to Japan from South Korea surpassed 7 million people during 2017, making it the second largest source of tourist traffic behind China.

“We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Yanolja, one of South Korea’s leading short-term accommodation booking platforms,” said Munekatsu Ota, Representative Director of Rakuten LIFULL STAY. “We’re looking forward to working closely to promote Japan as an exciting travel destination to South Korean travelers.”

“Our collaboration with Rakuten LIFULL STAY is a strong step for us into the global travel and tourism market and will offer our customers more travel options to Japan,” said Soojin Lee, founder and the CEO of Yanolja. “Yanolja aims to alleviate the inconvenience that many Korean customers face with planning international travel and also to offer international travelers to Korea a convenient accommodation booking service in Korea.”

Going forward, Yanolja and Rakuten LIFULL STAY will continue to offer a broad range of lodging options to meet the rising demand for travelers from South Korea to Japan, contributing to the development of the vacation rental market in Japan.

Note 1: “Vacation STAY” to be launched in June 2018.
Note 2: 2017 Visitor Arrivals & Japanese Overseas Travelers. Japan National Tourism Organization: https://www.jnto.go.jp/jpn/news/press_releases/pdf/180116_monthly.pdf

About Yanolja
Yanolja, Corp. is a leading “O2O (Online-to-Offline)” accommodation platform company headquartered in South Korea. It leads the industry in many aspects, including revenue growth, boasts more than 9 million online members and has more than 41,000 listings on its travel and stay database.

Yanolja has been playing a leading role in the Korean “space-rental” business providing travelers with real-time travel-and-stay booking services to a comprehensive database of hotels, motels, private lodgings, guesthouse and international destinations. It is also the first travel-and-stay business in South Korea that has more than 120 franchise hotels.

Yanolja also provides continuing education program services called MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operation) to its domestic registered travel-and-stay service providers. Currently, Yanolja is driving innovation in the travel and tourism industry by utilizing new technologies like IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence) and AR (Augmented Reality) to offer advance customer experience solutions and to evolve into a leading global travel-and-stay platform service provider.