WAUG Travel Inc
Founder : Yoon Sun-woo
Founded in : 2015
Financing status : USD 2.3 M for Series B
WAUG Travel, a travel activity reservation platform startup, announced on April 4 that it raised KRW 2.7 billion worth of investment from a South Korean tax refund company, Global Tax Free (GTF).
Founded in January 2015, WAUG Travel is a service provider from the travel activity reservation platform, WAUG, where travellers can easily book tickets for activities and transportation in the local area. Within fourteen months of the service’s launch, WAUG was used by more than 600,000 users and the total number of transactions on the platform exceeded 80,000.
WAUG Travel is also expanding the extent of its business. It originally started as a so-called “outbound platform” that provided domestic users with activities for overseas travel, but now, thanks to the steadily increasing flow of foreign tourists into Korea, the company is planning to start an inbound business.
Its investor, GTF, is Korea’s first tax refund company that has a wide network of more than 100 refund channels and 9,200 merchants.
“The domestic outbound is very intense competition, but there are no inbound companies yet,” said Yoon Sun-woo, CEO of WAUG travel. “In the majority of major tourist destinations in Seoul, there are GTF refund booths and kiosks. So, if we can place it where foreigners visit a lot, they can buy tickets for domestic travel and we will have a ripple effect.”
————————————————————————————-
This article, entitled “South Korean inbound travel platform WAUG Travel attracts USD 2.3 M from Global Tax Free”, was written in Korean by Platum, edited by AllTechAsia.