S.Korea's LG Uplus branches to offer travel services

South Korea's telecom service provider LG Uplus Corp. will start offering travel services at its offline branches.

The company on Wednesday said it will open next month its first Mode Tour Collab Store at its branch in the shopping complex Lafesta in the northern Seoul suburb of Goyang, Gyeonggi Province.

The company and the leading domestic travel agency Modetour Network Inc. on Aug. 2 signed a memorandum of understanding on offline platform stores and "a shop-in-shop" partnership. Given the country's mind-boggling rebound in overseas travel with the near end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the plan is to create a specialized store to offer travel consulting on everything from tourism products to global roaming service.

The specialized store will be in the form of a shop-in-shop corner at an LG Uplus branch. Visitors can buy not only travel packages there but also receive consultation on telecom service for overseas travel in one place.

This strategy seeks to boost user contact points and create synergy through services integrating communication and travel. The goal is to give customers more reasons to visit a branch other than for smartphone-related service.

Both sides will create exclusively for LG Uplus subscribers Mode Tour products and events that combine the telecom company's global roaming service. The travel agency's items will also be added to the tourism category of the LG Uplus members app U+ Membership.

“We will try a range of promotions to allow subscribers to purchase tourism products at lower prices,” an LG Uplus source said.

The two companies will expand the shop-in-shop corners nationwide, with LG Uplus running about 2,000 branches nationwide.

"We will expand the roles of Uples from just signing up mobile phone subscribers and accepting bill payment to a wider variety of uses," said Lee Jae-won, head of LG Uplus' MX Innovation Group.

Industry observers expect other telecom companies to follow this move by LG Uplus.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com