Yahoo!, Recruit to Join in Travel Service

Yahoo! Japan Corp. and Recruit Co. will tie up on online travel reservations, coping with Rakuten Inc. which dominates the market in Japan.

Beginning January, information on hotels and inns that have contracts with Recruit’s jalan.net site will be posted on the Yahoo! Travel site. As a result, Yahoo! will be handling reservations for about 15,000 domestic facilities, close to Rakuten’s 17,000, the Asahi Shimbun reported Wednesday.

The alliance will initially cover domestic facilities only, but Yahoo! and Recruit are considering expanding to overseas travel.

Yahoo!, the third-largest player in online travel reservations market, serves about 8,500 hotels and inns. Recruit, the second-largest, handles reservations for about 12,000 facilities.

About 5,500 facilities have contracts with both companies.

Recruit expects the heavy traffic on Yahoo!’s Web site to bolster sales of its own reservation services.

Rakuten Travel handles reservations totaling about 11 million nights a year. By comparison, Yahoo! Travel handled 1.65 million nights and the jalan.net site 6.41 million in 2004.

Rakuten Travel has grown rapidly since 2003, when it purchased Tabi no Madoguchi, the largest domestic service at the time, from Hitachi Zosen Corp.