Pegipegi

» see pegipegi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There is a version of this company in nearly every country, and the version I would have used is Turkish. Pegipegi sold Indonesian travel to Indonesians in Indonesian, which is the entire distance between me and it. The reason it earns a stone here is not the product, which was unremarkable in the way good infrastructure usually is. It is who owned it at the end.

It launched on 7 May 2012 in Jakarta under the company name PT Go Online Destinations, with the tourism minister at the opening, which says something about how seriously the government took online travel that year. The money came from PT Alternative Media Group locally and Recruit Holdings out of Japan. You booked hotel rooms and plane tickets at first, then trains and intercity buses, on a website and later an app that did the same job.

It worked for a decent stretch. Roughly seven thousand hotels were bookable through it, which in a country spread over seventeen thousand islands is genuine coverage rather than a directory. Then on 11 December 2023, eleven and a half years in, the company announced it was finished. The last order it accepted had gone through the day before.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Indonesia in 2012 was where a lot of people expected the next enormous consumer internet market to appear, and travel was the obvious first thing to move online in an archipelago where getting anywhere means buying a ticket. Pegipegi arrived at the front of that wave, next to Traveloka and Tiket.com. For a few years everybody grew, because the market was expanding faster than any of them could take share from the others.

~ who owned it ~

In 2018 Pegipegi was acquired outright by Jet Tech Innovation Ventures, a Singapore investment company that Indonesian outlets report as sitting under Traveloka. The competitor bought the competition and then kept running it as a separate brand for five more years. There is no public accounting of what that was supposed to achieve, and the plainest reading is that a second brand was worth having until the day it was not.

~ the unraveling ~

Then came 2020, and an online travel agency in a country that closed its borders had no business left to do. Pegipegi survived the pandemic on paper, but the recovery afterward did not restore the old shape of the market. Bookings came back concentrated on the largest apps, which is the usual outcome when a category goes dormant for two years and customers have to choose again from scratch.

~ the long tail ~

The ending was orderly, which is rarer than it should be. Tickets already purchased stayed valid, and anyone holding a booking could write in for a refund or a reschedule. Nobody lost a flight over it. A brand that had been part of how an entire country moved around for eleven years simply stopped taking orders on 10 December and posted a goodbye on 11 December.

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