Zuji

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

~ the goodbye ~

Sixteen airlines flying in Asia put money into one website in 2002, and Travelocity, then owned by Sabre, ran it for them. The name was Zuji. The logo described it as a Travelocity company above the line "Your online travel guru", which is precisely how a 2002 travel site introduced itself.

The problem it existed to solve was a real one. In 2002, buying a plane ticket in Singapore or Hong Kong still mostly meant a travel agent behind a counter, and the airlines wanted a channel that was not that. Zuji sold flights and hotel rooms across a set of Asia-Pacific markets, with an Australian arm of its own, and for most of the 2000s it was the name people in those two cities typed first.

Zuji never sold a ticket out of Turkey and I have never booked a flight from either of its home cities. What pulled me into this one is the ownership chain, because it explains the ending better than the ending does.

~ the chronicle ~

~ passed along ~

In March 2013 Travelocity sold Zuji to Webjet, the Australian online agency, for A$25 million. Webjet ran it for three and a half years and then sold the Hong Kong and Singapore businesses in November 2016 for A$56 million, booking a gain of around A$26 million. Webjet doubled its money.

The buyers were two subsidiaries of Uriel Aviation Holdings: Reckon Holidays in Hong Kong and Sharp Focus Pacific in Singapore. Regional trade press reported, and kept reporting, that Uriel was HNA Group. HNA was midway through a global buying spree when the deal closed and midway through a debt crisis two years later, and a small booking site held inside a conglomerate that cannot pay its own bills is a poor place to leave a customer's deposit.

~ the money that stopped moving ~

An online travel agency takes your money and issues your ticket, then settles up with the airline through IATA's Billing and Settlement Plan. If the settlements stop arriving, IATA removes the agency from the plan, and at that moment it cannot issue tickets at all. IATA terminated Zuji's participation in Singapore and Hong Kong in early January 2019, saying the company had not met the conditions for reinstatement.

The licenses went at the same time. Zuji's Singapore travel agent license lapsed on 31 December 2018 and was not renewed. The Hong Kong license expired on 9 January 2019. Singapore's consumer association had logged 33 complaints about Zuji refund delays over the previous year, and Zuji Hong Kong was still posting on Facebook that it was "experiencing technical difficulties on processing refund" days before the end.

~ 11 january ~

Operations stopped on the Friday night of 11 January 2019, in both cities at once. More than fifty customers were waiting on HK$250,000 between them, around US$32,000, which is a small enough number that it reads worse than a large one would. Hong Kong's Travel Agents Registry noted that Zuji still owed those people their refunds and still had to honor bookings already made, while also no longer being permitted to operate as a travel agent at all.

zuji.com does not answer now. zuji.com.sg belongs to a licensed money lender in Singapore and its front page offers personal loans around the clock. zuji.com.hk is a Wix site with a travel blog on it, put there by whoever holds the domain, which is the shape a resold name takes rather than a survival.

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