SEOUL, South Korea—May 30, 2023— Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that Yanolja, South Korea’s leading leisure platform, is accelerating its global expansion on AWS. On Yanolja’s online marketplace, 70 million users can easily search, compare, and book accommodation, leisure, transportation, flights, or concert tickets. Yanolja’s sales grew 83% in 2022, and the company now serves 170 countries in more than 60 languages, with more than 80,000 solution licenses. The born in the cloud travel app’s growing global presence relies on AWS’s world-class infrastructure, including AWS Regions in Seoul, Japan, Singapore, and the US, to increase agility, lower latency, and drive innovation. During the company’s rapid expansion in the last six years, Yanolja’s cloud footprint grew 150-fold while IT costs were reduced by 15% with AWS.
The lifting of COVID-19 travel restrictions in 2022 led to a 60% increase in demand for outbound travel in South Korea. To accommodate the resulting surge in travel transactions, Yanolja uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives the company the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS. With Amazon EKS, Yanolja can automatically scale up with spikes in user demand, like during holiday periods or travel promotions, or scale down during slow periods to avoid wasting resources. Yanolja also uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), an easy-to-use, high performance block storage service, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that removes time-consuming database administrative tasks.
To digitize the travel and hospitality industry, Yanolja founded Yanolja Cloud, an AWS Software Partner providing cloud-based hospitality solutions, in 2019. In 2022, Yanolja Cloud attained the AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency, which recognizes the company for delivering product innovation in the travel, accommodation, leisure, food and beverage, and residence industries. One such innovation is an integrated IoT and AI-based hotel solution, which records guest preferences for lighting, room temperature, and amenities, ensuring hotel rooms are in optimal condition to improve the guest experience.
Yanolja also uses AWS IoT Device Defender, a fully managed internet of things (IoT) security service, and AWS IoT Device Management, to secure and manage IoT devices, including temperature sensors measuring hotel room conditions, at scale.
“With the travel sector seeing a rapid recovery from the pandemic, Yanolja is expanding its solution to exceed diverse customer expectations for exciting holidays, and AWS is helping us to scale and reduce IT costs,” said Junyoung Lee, co-representative of Yanolja Cloud. “By leveraging AWS’s world-class infrastructure, we are set to continue our expansion globally as a leading service provider in the leisure industry.”
“Scalable cloud infrastructure is crucial for the travel industry as demand for hotels and flights continues to rise,” said Kee Ho Ham, managing director of AWS Korea. “Yanolja provides a seamless booking experience on AWS, and can easily cope with user spikes while offering new hospitality services at lower cost. We are excited to continue our collaboration with Yanolja, using cloud technology to make travel and experiences better, cost-effective, and more accessible for all.”
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