BARELY a month after Raja Kamar International (RKI) was formed, the Indonesian hotel distribution company has announced its full acquisition of MG Holiday, a leading hotel wholesaler in the country.
With this, RKI now operates two businesses – the B2C Raja Kamar Indonesia (rajakamar.com) and the B2B MG Holiday.
The acquisition sees two MG Holiday founders and shareholders, Eddy Yeow and Raymond, becoming RKI’s stakeholders, apart from Panorama Group, Dwidaya Tour and Travel and Smailing Tours.
RKI Group CEO, Scott Blume, said: “This transaction will bring considerable benefits to the RKI group, including direct access to MG Holiday’s extensive hotel inventory across Indonesia. This direct access to 1,800 hotels will allow the combined Raja Kamar group to work closely with hotels across existing wholesale channels and bring hotel partners access to new customers via Rajakamar.com.”
MG Holiday will continue to buy the bulk of rooms and Rajakamar.com, in turn, will buy inventory from them.
MG Holiday, set up in 2000, started with a team of three, including the two shareholders. It has now grown to six offices and more than 260 staff.
When asked about how it would maintain its business relations with travel retailers, Raymond said: “We will be treating Raja Kamar the same as the other retailers. We have created another website, kamarkami.com which is accessible to all our other retailers. In other words, we provide competing hotel booking engines inside the company to be fair to all our partners.”
In the meantime, Blume said that stakeholders have committed to invest US$20 million over the next five years to develop the RKI Group in terms of systems, human resources and offices, among others.
