Handy (Tink Labs)

» see handy.travel as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Terence Kwok left his studies in Chicago and started Tink Labs in Hong Kong in 2012, renting phones to travelers at the airport so they could avoid roaming charges. The better version of that idea was obvious once he had it. Do not meet the traveler at arrivals, meet them in the room. In 2013 the company began putting handsets in hotel rooms, and it took nine months to convince the first hotel in Hong Kong to accept a free phone.

The device was called Handy, and from a guest's side it was close to free money. Unlimited local and international calls, plus mobile data you could carry out of the building. An in-house editorial team wrote the city guide loaded on it. The hotel paid little or nothing; the economics were supposed to come from advertising, bookings and whatever a captive traveler would tap. Foxconn's FIH Mobile put in $13M in 2015, a $125M round landed on 28 September 2016, and by 2018 SoftBank was in a joint venture and the valuation had passed $1.5 billion. Hyatt and InterContinental were customers. At the end of 2018 the phones were in 600,000 rooms in more than 82 countries, which made Tink Labs one of the few Hong Kong companies anyone called a unicorn.

Then it stopped, quickly and badly. On 2 July 2019 Kwok told employees on a global conference call that the company was splitting in two as part of a restructuring. Operations ceased on 1 August. Hotels in Morocco and Thailand were told their devices would lose cellular service within six to twelve hours. Hong Kong and Singapore contracts were reassigned to a separate entity called Blockone Limited, which promptly stopped supplying free handsets to some of those hotels. More than a hundred staff across the company's EMEA operation never received their July salaries.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it got into the rooms ~

Handy sold itself to hotels as a line item they did not have to fund. A hotel that bought it got a guest amenity for free, plus a replacement for the beige desk phone nobody had touched since 2004. Guests liked it for the twenty minutes it took to realize they already had a phone with their own contacts in it. The product was useful to exactly one person: someone landing in a country where their own SIM would bankrupt them.

This is a thing you could only meet by checking into the right hotel on someone else's budget, which is why most people who read about the collapse in 2019 had never seen one. I had not. My travel in those years was domestic and the rooms were not the kind that came with a loaner smartphone.

~ the economics nobody solved ~

Giving away hardware plus a data plan costs real money per room per month. Recovering it from advertising requires guests to use the device for long enough to see the advertising, and a guest with an unlocked phone in their pocket does not. Tink Labs raised around $160M chasing the gap between those two facts, and the gap did not close at 600,000 rooms any more than it had at 20,000.

The usual version of this story ends with an acquirer buying the installed base. There was no acquirer. The installed base was a liability: hundreds of thousands of handsets in rooms on four continents, all of them needing a SIM somebody pays for monthly.

~ the last twelve hours ~

The detail that stays with me is the warning window. Hotels were not given a quarter's notice or a month. They were told that the phones sitting on the nightstands of their occupied rooms would go offline within half a day, which is the shortest notice period in any shutdown in this archive that involved physical objects in other people's buildings. Somewhere in Casablanca and Bangkok there were guests who picked up a free phone that afternoon and found it dead, with no explanation printed anywhere in the room.

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