Trip.com's $8.9B Year Leads Asia's 2026 Travel-Tech IPO Wave

Trip.com Group posted $8.9 billion in revenue in 2025, up 17%, with international bookings surging around 60% — the anchor fact in a year when Asia's travel platforms are racing to the public markets. Klook has filed for a New York IPO, OYO is preparing a fresh listing, and Traveloka is weighing one at a $5–6 billion valuation. The Asia-Pacific travel market, per Phocuswright, is on track for $555 billion by 2027 at a 7% compound growth rate, outpacing every other region.

How strong is the recovery, really?

Real but uneven. Asia-Pacific arrivals reached 331 million in 2025, up 6%, yet still about 9% below 2019 — the one major region not fully recovered (UN Tourism). The mix has shifted: intra-ASEAN travel rose from 37% of Southeast Asia's international arrivals in 2019 to 45% in 2024. Chinese outbound volume has roughly recovered to its 2019 level of around 155 million trips, but spending sits about 28% below pre-COVID. The comeback is in bodies, not wallets.

Trip.com is the region's giant and the world's third-largest online travel company by market value, roughly $47 billion. Its portfolio spans Ctrip and Qunar in China, the international Trip.com brand, and Skyscanner. It is the booking platform of choice for nearly 69% of Chinese travellers.

One headline number needs interrogation. Net profit nearly doubled to 33.4 billion yuan in 2025, but over half came from one-off investment gains; core profit excluding them was around 13.4 billion yuan. Trip.com remains less than a third the size of Booking Holdings — a measure of remaining runway.

Who is going public?

The listing queue is crowded:

• Klook, the Hong Kong-based experiences platform, filed for a New York IPO in late 2025 after hitting $3.04 billion in gross bookings and its first positive adjusted EBITDA — a knife-edge profitability story timed to the listing.
• Traveloka, Southeast Asia's largest home-grown OTA backed by GIC, the Qatar Investment Authority and Expedia, is weighing an IPO at $5–6 billion, possibly a dual listing, with no firm date.
• OYO, the SoftBank-backed budget-hotel operator, is preparing a fresh IPO targeting $7–8 billion — a 35–40% haircut from the $12 billion it chased at peak — after posting its first full-year profit of around 623 crore rupees.
• ixigo already listed in India in 2024, oversubscribed nearly 100 times.

India's market leader remains MakeMyTrip, with over half the online travel market and record FY25 gross bookings of $9.8 billion. India's OTAs are genuinely profitable, a break from the cash-burning growth era.

Agoda, part of Booking Holdings and headquartered in Singapore with major Bangkok operations, remains Southeast Asia's quiet heavyweight.

What sits beneath the giants?

A fast-growing infrastructure layer. Zuzu Hospitality, a property-management system (hotel software handling bookings and operations) for mid-sized Asian hotels, now serves close to 3,000 properties — digitising the long tail the big OTAs don't reach. Korea's Tripbtoz blends social discovery with hotel booking and became one of the first Asian OTAs listed on ChatGPT. ByHours sells hotel rooms in 3-, 6- or 24-hour blocks. TripGuru connects travellers directly with local guides across Asia. In experiences, Klook is Asia's champion of a fast-digitising segment, alongside the now-profitable GetYourGuide.

Japan and Korea show where demand is strongest. Japan recorded 42.7 million international visitors in 2025, up 15.8% and roughly 10 million above its pre-pandemic peak, driven by a weak yen (Japan National Tourism Organization); South Korea (9.5 million) and China (9.1 million) led arrivals. Korea's only travel-tech unicorn, Yanolja, grew enterprise-solutions revenue around 62% in 2024 and consolidated consumer brands including Interpark Triple into a platform called NOL Universe — selling the plumbing the way Trip.com once scaled from a domestic app.

Is AI the next distribution battleground?

The frontier is shifting from search to agentic booking — AI that plans and books the trip. Trip.com's assistant TripGenie saw AI-assisted order volume grow around 400% year on year, handling end-to-end itineraries across flights, hotels and activities. Industry data suggests a majority of travellers now use some AI tool during booking. Startups such as Zytlyn, a travel-demand predictions platform serving airlines, airports and OTAs, are building the data layer beneath autonomous agents.

For Asia's platforms, the prize is owning that agent layer before a Google or an OpenAI does — which is why Trip.com keeps pouring capital into TripGenie as its rivals head to market.