Newly appointed Rakuten Travel Xchange (RTX) CEO James Park outlines plans to accelerate international growth, deepen direct hotel partnerships across Asia-Pacific and beyond, and use AI to improve connectivity, content and booking experiences
What are your first steps as you move from COO to CEO?
My priority is to build and organise the integration process for a harmonised strategy.
Rakuten Travel is focused on the Japanese market and adding value to Japanese suppliers and customers, while RTX – which buys inventory to introduce to the Japanese consumer, and supports Asia-Pacific and global players to simplify their global connectivity through our platform – is to drive global expansion, and add value to the travel industry.
To accelerate our globalisation, it is important to expand the number of our clients, the client reach, and develop a direct supply relationship with hotels.
What do the Q12026 results show, and where is global expansion taking place?
Year-on-year, the travel business, both domestic and global, maintained high growth rates with gross transaction value increasing 8.1 per cent and 69.7 per cent respectively.
For the second part, I have to split the answer into two categories: the demand side and the supply side.
We are seeing a boom in the number of US consumers, in vacation rentals, and travellers who are not just using Expedia, but also non-travel related and financial websites.
Chinese and Koreans are travelling abroad more than the Japanese these days, and we can capture that demand.
There are also big changes in B2B, with players plugging into white-label platforms and requiring inventory.
While China and the US are the largest travel markets, Europe is also growing. Online travel is dominated by just the one or two companies. But usage is changing, and we wish to provide the hotel inventory.
On the supply side, there are synergies in the US West Coast and whenever we get new inventory, we introduce it to the Japanese consumer and Asia-Pacific-wide.
The US East Coast is also important because the US is still largely dominated by domestic demand, and the East Coast, including the Caribbean islands, are top destinations.
What about closer to home?
We have more than 10 offices in the Asia-Pacific region in cities such as Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, and Bangkok, and we have introduced those inventories to the Japanese customer, and driving supply expansion from these regional offices.
We are targeting higher-tier hotels, and have also customised connectivity solutions for the Japanese customer.
Our first targets are regional chains, especially business hotel chains, in big cities or resort areas, which tend to be dominated and managed by Western companies.
We want to work with local chain hotels to build something new Asia-Pacific-wide. While I can’t name them, I can say were are focusing on South-east Asian brands.
From the supply side, South-east Asia is one of the most popular regions in Asia-Pacific, and cities such as Bangkok are one of the top destinations in the world.
From the demand side, the number of South-east Asian travellers is increasing, and so is spending.
How does RTX stand out? Would you say it’s the numbers – 500,000 hotel properties, 200,000 vacation rental properties, 20,000 directly contracted properties, and being in 200 countries?
Yes, we have access to a big number of partners and industry players in the world. But what is most important is being able to access an exclusive rate, and how much of a differentiation – and our biggest differentiator is, of course, the Japanese hotels.
We haven’t seen anyone who can call out “We are the largest in Asia-Pacific” yet, so we want to be in that position.
How are you using AI?
We have launched AI concierge on our Japan platform and it will be the model globally.
With Rakuten AI (a comprehensive, agentic AI platform and suite of Large Language Models, developed by Rakuten Group to integrate AI across its vast ecosystem), Rakuten Travel’s new booking feature allows users to receive end-to-end agentic support from tailored recommendations to accommodation facility booking.
We are now collecting more intelligence and user behaviour, and like other online travel companies, we do see a big increase in AI (and Agentic AI) use.
AI can help Japanese hotels and accommodation partners who tend to explain their beauty and charm in great detail, but consumers may not have time to consume so much information.
Japanese customers love reading all the details, but not necessarily customers in other countries.
When we roll out in South-east Asian, AI will definitely add value to standardise fragmented hotel descriptions, in mapping hotels and room types, remove overlapping – when a hotel’s name, or room type is slightly different, AI knows which is correct and which is wrong, correct it, and increase accuracy.
Another area where AI can do better is in translation, especially in Asia-Pacific with so many different languages, different alphabets, and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.
Rakuten AI can translate original copy in Chinese, Korean, etc, more accurately into standardised English or other key languages, compared to asking hotels to translate and submit copy in English.
The booking service itself is still in development, and only available for the hotel portion. But in future, booking a rental car or packages will be on one single AI platform.
Note: Rakuten Group is a Japanese technology and Internet conglomerate that operates as a global ecosystem of over 70 businesses spanning e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and telecommunications.
