Yanolja is a number one global technology company offering comprehensive data-driven services to reinforce experiences for each travel industry enterprises and travelers. Yanolja’s cloud-based platform connects over 1.3 million travel corporations across 206 countries, delivering vertical AI services that improve efficiency and profitability for businesses while elevating the standard of experiences for travelers.
Prior to Yanolja, Junyoung had a distinguished profession at Google, where he worked for nearly twenty years in various roles, including Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, and Engineering Director. He was the primary Korean worker at Google globally, and through his tenure, he contributed to quite a few groundbreaking engineering initiatives.
Junyoung’s earlier experience includes software engineering roles at Yahoo and Samsung Electronics, where he developed and honed his technical expertise.
You’ve had an incredible journey from Google to Yanolja, including a job in establishing Google Korea. What motivated you to transition from a tech giant to a rapidly growing company like Yanolja?
My journey began as the primary Korean native speaker hired at Google HQ in California, where I later helped arrange Google Korea. Over twenty years at Google, I witnessed how data and technology can transform lives and drive meaningful innovation. Yet, as impactful as these advancements were, the travel industry had lagged behind in adopting cutting-edge technology.
After I met Sujin Lee, Yanolja’s founder, his vision of addressing the inefficiencies and challenges in travel struck a chord. Travel involves dreaming, planning, booking, and sharing—processes that generate immense amounts of information. Nevertheless, this data has remained largely underutilized. Yanolja’s commitment to leveraging AI and advanced data platforms to enhance these experiences was inspiring. It was a novel opportunity to affix an organization on the forefront of reworking a whole industry.
Yanolja’s daring vision, powered by AI and our proprietary data lake, allows us to refine and augment data to create Vertical AI solutions tailored for the travel and hospitality sectors. This approach not only enhances operational efficiency but additionally redefines customer experiences, positioning Yanolja as a world leader in travel tech.
As a pacesetter within the AI space, what lessons from Google and your previous roles have been most impactful in shaping your approach to driving AI innovation at Yanolja?
Two key lessons have shaped my approach. First, technology must be human-centered. The pace of innovation often outstrips people’s ability to adapt, so intuitive design is critical for broader adoption. Second, data is the inspiration of AI. If data is incomplete or flawed, AI outcomes could be inaccurate and even harmful, very like a baby acting on misleading experiences.
At Yanolja, we prioritize data integrity across all the travel value chain. By ensuring that the info flowing through our systems is accurate, we deliver secure, transparent solutions for each our B2B partners and end customers. That is where Yanolja’s Vertical AI approach becomes critical—we focus on AI solutions tailored for the travel industry, driving measurable results that directly enhance profitability and customer satisfaction.
How has your experience working across different countries and tech ecosystems (South Korea, Silicon Valley) influenced your leadership style and vision for technology?
At Google in Silicon Valley, I collaborated with teams from all over the world on global services, which taught me the importance of aligning diverse teams toward a standard goal. At Yanolja, I now lead R&D teams across Korea, India, Israel, and Europe, uniting them as “One Yanolja Team” to drive innovation and execute projects collaboratively.
My Silicon Valley experience reinforced the necessity to balance short-term business priorities with long-term technological investments. While immediate solutions address pressing challenges, sustainable innovation requires foundational work. At Yanolja, we integrate data and AI to tackle today’s business needs while constructing a platform for future leadership within the travel tech industry.
How is Yanolja leveraging AI to rework the travel and hospitality industry, particularly in areas like operational efficiency and customer experience?
The travel industry has long been slow to embrace technological change. Many operations in hospitality and booking are still manual or inefficient, limiting each productivity and potential growth. At Yanolja, we’ve introduced AI-driven solutions to handle these gaps.
For instance, our Dynamic Pricing solution uses AI and machine learning (ML) to automate real-time price adjustments, directly impacting hotel revenues by replacing manual processes with smarter, data-driven decisions. Similarly, our AI-powered travel planning services offer personalized itineraries and optimized travel routes, enhancing customer experiences.
Beyond these examples, Yanolja applies AI across customer support, marketing, workflow optimization, and product development. Our Vertical AI solutions are tailored to satisfy the unique needs of travel businesses, enabling us to guide the industry’s transformation by creating progressive, efficient, and customer-centric systems.
Yanolja operates in over 200 countries. What challenges and opportunities include scaling AI solutions for such a various global audience?
Scaling AI solutions globally requires understanding diverse market needs while leveraging shared insights. For instance, our Dynamic Pricing AI adapts seamlessly to markets like South Africa, India, and Korea using a single model that identifies universal pricing patterns from our data lake.
One significant challenge is overcoming language barriers. To deal with this, we’ve developed AI-powered tools like context-aware image translations, enabling non-Korean speakers to access localized content in English, Japanese and Chinese. Today, Yanolja supports over 60 languages, reflecting our commitment to inclusivity and global accessibility.
Yanolja offers an integrated suite of solutions like cloud PMS, booking engines, and payment systems. Are you able to share insights into how these systems use AI to reinforce productivity and personalization?
We’ve integrated AI into our cloud-based hotel management system (PMS) to streamline operations. For example, our AI interface allows hotel managers to question tasks like room assignments or operational reports conversationally, simplifying complex processes.
Moreover, AI-powered customer support tools help us automate the classification and prioritization of inquiries, reducing response times by 40%. These innovations, combined with our Vertical AI solutions, ensure operational efficiency and personalization for all stakeholders.
How does Yanolja’s proprietary Data Lake help unlock latest AI applications, and what role does data quality play within the success of your solutions?
AI continues to unlock the potential of underutilized data, transforming online travel agencies (OTAs) into hyper-personalized travel agents and enhancing customer experiences. Yanolja’s give attention to Vertical AI ensures our solutions deliver measurable impact, setting us apart as leaders within the evolving travel ecosystem.
As we glance ahead, we envision AI not only optimizing travel bookings or itineraries but enabling fully integrated, seamless travel experiences. AI-driven insights will empower businesses to predict and meet customer needs more effectively, ensuring every aspect of a traveler’s journey is personalized and optimized. To realize this, Yanolja is constructing a travel data platform tailored for the industry, incorporating connectivity, a single source of truth via an information lake, and AI/ML-based data technologies—all of that are critical to maintaining data quality and unlocking latest applications.
What trends do you see shaping the long run of AI within the travel industry, and the way is Yanolja positioning itself to guide on this space?
AI is poised to revolutionize the travel industry by unlocking the vast potential of underutilized data. Over the following decade, we are going to see a shift from easy booking platforms to highly sophisticated, AI-driven agents that provide hyper-personalized travel experiences. These AI agents is not going to only help travelers plan but will even assist in real-time decision-making during their journey.
At Yanolja, we’re on the forefront of this transformation by specializing in Vertical AI—creating specialized applications that address the unique challenges of the travel industry. Our data-driven solutions are already helping businesses optimize operations, personalize services, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.
The longer term will even see greater integration of AI across all the travel journey, from the moment a customer dreams about their trip to once they share their experience post-trip. We’re positioning ourselves to guide this alteration by investing heavily in AI capabilities that may proceed to disrupt and redefine how the travel industry operates.
As someone who built and managed teams at Google Korea and now Yanolja, what advice do you could have for fostering innovation and collaboration in tech teams?
In the beginning, it’s vital to have a transparent and sustainable vision and mission for what we aim to attain with technology. Everybody brings unique strengths to the table. Nevertheless, regardless of how talented a bunch of individuals is, in the event that they aren’t aligned of their direction, they risk falling behind within the rapidly changing external environment of the AI era. I consider that what’s needed today shouldn’t be one genius who can’t collaborate, but a team of 10 individuals with exceptional teamwork. It’s about taking 10 pieces of wood—each different in shape, size, and color—and turning them into a novel masterpiece. The final word goal is to create something that improves the lives of individuals all over the world. This, I consider, is the role of tech teams within the AI era.
Where do you see Yanolja in the following 5–10 years, particularly in its quest to change into a world leader in travel technology?
Leaving a well-established company in Silicon Valley to affix Yanolja was driven by my goal to disrupt the travel industry globally as a tech company, leveraging data. That process is already underway, and the pace is accelerating. On the core of this transformation is AI. Innovation through technology is reshaping the world, and as a tech executive, it’s my role and responsibility to make sure that AI-driven solutions create services that meet customer needs and ultimately drive Yanolja’s success.
Looking ahead, Yanolja goals to be the inspiration for global travel innovation, leveraging our Vertical AI capabilities to construct a unified, efficient travel ecosystem. Over the following decade, we envision our AI-driven solutions not only enhancing operational efficiencies but additionally creating entirely latest ways for businesses and consumers to experience travel, disrupting the industry in ways we’ve only just begun to explore.
