Recently, Thailand’s A+ Travel (hereinafter referred to as “A+ Travel”) announced that it has received 50 million Thai baht in financing from Thailand’s Kasetsart University Group. Established in 1995, Kasetsart University Group has grown over twenty years into one of Thailand’s major travel agency enterprises. According to the announcement, this round of funding will primarily be used for the in-depth development of destination travel. Following this investment, A+ Travel will devote more effort, in collaboration with Kasetsart University Group, to further develop personalized day tours and boutique small-group tour products, strengthen the destination service system, improve local fragmented resources, and intensify efforts to create in-depth, distinctive experiences. The goal is to meet travelers’ personalized needs in a one-stop manner and to fully establish itself as a leading brand in Thailand’s independent travel market.
A+ Travel mainly serves various B-end clients in China such as OTAs, travel agencies, and e-commerce platforms, acting as an overseas independent travel S2B supplier. To accelerate the supply and sales efficiency of fragmented products, the platform has achieved API integration with major websites such as Fliggy, Mafengwo, and Ctrip, transforming fragmented offerings into digitized data. This enables support for micro-services at sufficiently low costs, real-time order processing, information synchronization, and ultimately leads toward intelligent operations.
Traditional offline tourism channels often lure tourists with low prices and push shopping, offering no service guarantees. Many tourism products are trapped in a vicious cycle of low-price and low-quality competition, while standardized products lack in-depth experiences and suffer from severe SKU homogenization, leaving travelers fatigued by choices. A+ Travel leverages its deep service experience as a foundation, stays close to user needs, and integrates travel destination resources to create personalized travel services. Currently, the platform offers services such as airport transfers, chartered cars, hotels, attraction tickets, business travel management, premium small group tours, and private customization. Users can select travel products and customize their itineraries according to their individual needs.
At present, the company has established strategic supply chain partnerships with hundreds of online and offline travel agencies, as well as long-term supply relationships with major OTAs such as Ctrip and Tuniu. The company stated that it does not currently plan to open more directly operated stores but will instead focus more effort on the B-end. This is because B-end clients generally lack bargaining power with upstream suppliers and often fail to secure quality resource support. However, since A+ Travel has completed its online support for B-end clients, it can accurately and in real time understand their needs for certain public services, helping them integrate procurement from upstream suppliers to obtain better prices and services.
Kasetsart University Group stated that although the number of outbound travelers has reached new highs year after year, the share of traditional tourism in the market has shown a declining trend in recent years. Independent travel is expected to become the dominant mode of tourism in the future, and the industry will eventually evolve toward a C2B model. The A+ Travel team can go deep into overseas destinations, uncover and provide high-quality local fragmented travel products, and through its internal IT system and platform API integration, deliver an efficient user ordering and fulfillment experience. This aligns with the development direction of independent travel in the big data era.
It has been revealed that A+ Travel’s next step will address current industry pain points such as “difficulty in ticket booking and inquiry” and “challenges in ticket pick-up communication.” Leveraging the investor’s rich local resources, the platform will connect with major attractions in Thailand to enable features such as real-time inventory updates and QR code ticket retrieval.
