Klook cofounder Ethan Lin thinks the U.S. can help grow one of Asia’s largest travel platforms

The inspiration for Klook, one of Asia’s largest travel platforms, came after Ethan Lin took a trip to Nepal with his friend Eric Gnock Fah. The two were both analysts in Hong Kong’s investment scene: Fah covered consumer retail, while Lin covered hospitality and real estate. 

Both were also third-culture kids. Fah grew up in Mauritius, the small Indian Ocean nation whose economy relies almost entirely on tourism. Lin, in contrast, lived in several cities as a child before starting college in the U.S. He links his love of travel to his background: “Experiencing local culture, understanding how the world puts together different markets, traveling a lot with my parents.”

Lin’s Nepal trip was a bit of a disaster, in his telling. “We noticed that payment, language, content, infrastructure, and discoverability were not there,” he tells Fortune. “It took us so long to find out what we could do—canyoning, white-water rafting and paragliding—and it was a lot of effort to plan.”

Then a close call pushed Lin and Fah to quit their jobs. As they were about to fly back from Pokhara to Kathmandu, they learned the flight that had left an hour before them had crashed. Later, on Linkedin, Lin wrote that the incident “pushed Eric and I to quit investment banking … and get to work.”

They then hired Bernie Xiong, a Chinese software engineer, to be Klook’s chief technology officer and third co-founder. The company released its first mobile app in mid-2015. Klook grew rapidly across Asia, thanks to a demographic Lin calls “FITs”: foreign independent travelers, who plan their own itineraries instead of booking a fixed-route group tour. Klook achieved unicorn status in 2018. 

Now, Klook is setting its sights beyond Asia. Eighty percent of the platform’s customers are currently based in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet according to Ethan Lin, Klook’s cofounder and CEO, Western travelers account for a growing share of users. Klook’s gross transaction volume from users outside of Asia has risen 13.4% over the past three years.

“The U.S. is actually one of our largest markets, especially as Americans are taking a growing interest in APAC destinations, where we have a strong........

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