Easybook going places

Booking platform expands to different business segments

IT was in 2006 that William Lee decided to find an alternative solution to facilitate commuting between Malaysia and Singapore.

As a Malaysian studying in Singapore, and a frequent traveller to the city-state, Lee says it was a hassle and time consuming to buy tickets at bus counters whenever he had to travel to Singapore and vice versa.

The turning point came when he decided to create an online booking transportation platform by the name of Easybook.

Initially, the platform only catered to selling online bus tickets in Singapore and Malaysia.

After an overwhelming response from buyers and to meet the rising demand for convenient and efficient transportation needs in South-east Asia, he tells Starbizweek, the platform widened its online services to include booking of train and ferry tickets; and car rentals, along with secondary services such as hotels and charter services.

Lee, who is the founder and chief executive officer of Easybook, says the platform is now one of the largest land and sea transportation online booking platforms in South-east Asia.

He says Easybook covers three main business segments – business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumers (B2C) and business-to-government (B2G).

Some of Easybook’s clients in the B2B segment are transport operators like Supernice Express, Sri Maju, Billion Stars, KBES and Dharma Indah. Currently there are more than 1,000 bus and ferry operators in Easybook’s platform.

In the B2C segment, Easybook at the moment has a fast growing database of over five million travellers.

In the B2G space, the platform provides a terminal management solution (SAAS based) for bus and ferry terminals. At the same time, it consolidates the tickets for all transport operators at the terminals.

Easybook’s solution has also been proven to solve critical ferry safety issues. It is implemented at more than 150 terminals in this region.

Some of these are in terminals located in Penang, Johor and Sabah in Malaysia, and Bali and Manado in Indonesia.

Lee says Easybook is fast expanding in Asean. Commenting on its expansion, he says: “Easybook is in 10 Asean countries and we are scaling up expansion in terms of capturing more transport operators and terminals, while converting offline customers to go online aggressively, especially in countries like Indonesia and in the Philippines.

“At the same time, we are partnering and forming strategic alliances with Grab, Shopee, Touch n Go, Boost and local governments.”

In terms of differentiating from its competitors, he says Easybook has the first-mover advantage in the transportation booking industry.

According to Lee, the platform has been expanding vertically since day one of its operations.

Besides that, he says it has the largest ticket source, vast distributorship, and after sales service process, that is, the check in process in the terminal during the departure of bus and ferries.

This silo integration, he says, prevents competitors from entering Easybook’s market easily.

Furthermore, he says most of the ticketing agents like Grab, Shopee and redbus are selling bus tickets and are getting the ticket inventories from Easybook’s application programming interface (API).

API enables two or more computer programmes or components to communicate with each other.

As for its financial performance, Lee adds that except for the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 to 2021, the platform has been growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 50%.

Last year, he says it secured a revenue of more than Rm280mil and a record profit, adding that there are plans for Easybook to go for a listing hopefully by 2025 or 2026.

Lee says this year, it anticipates to hit Rm514mil in revenue, and a profit of more than three times growth, noting that post Covid-19, the buying pattern of tickets has changed as more people have gone online to book tickets.

With the economy impacted by global headwinds, air travel is quite slow now and many are opting to travel by land and sea, he points out.

“Easybook is in 10 Asean countries and we are scaling up expansion in terms of capturing more transport operators and terminals.”

William Lee