An empty apartment has a curious talent: it can look like an investment while behaving like an expense. The walls are there. The lift works. The owner has the keys. What is missing is someone willing to pay to live inside. Hendry Rusli’s career at Travelio has increasingly revolved around that gap, between possessing a room and making it useful.
It was a different proposition when he stood before a gathering in a South Jakarta café in January 2015. Travelio had launched a hotel-booking website. Its invitation was cheerful and direct: “Your Trip, Your Price.” Customers could bargain over a hotel room online. The familiar pleasure of negotiating a deal had acquired a search box.
Within two years, Rusli was explaining a change of direction. Hotels were receding from the centre of the business. Privately owned accommodation was moving in. Eventually, the customer might stay for months, buy a property, or choose an apartment with a railway station in mind. The name Travelio remained. The meaning of the stay kept expanding.
A hotel room, a microphone, a bargain
Travelio’s early public life had the sociability of a travel club. At Convivium Café on January 31, 2015, bloggers and journalists joined a launch gathering where Rusli and co-founder Christina Suriadjaja explained the business. Travel writer Kenny Santana offered tips on funding a trip. The event lasted about two hours. The launch hashtag reached fourth place among Indonesia’s trending topics on Twitter.
In March came a more formal launch at Jakarta’s Gran Melia hotel. Tourism Minister Arief Yahya opened the event. Rusli, introduced as managing director, presented the company’s history and ambitions. Suriadjaja demonstrated the bargaining system. Travelio said roughly 5,000 hotels were available across Indonesia and other Asian markets.
The two settings capture the job he had taken on. A founder has to make an unfamiliar transaction seem approachable, then explain why it deserves a place in the market. At first, Travelio offered a particularly easy introduction: people already understood hotels, and people already understood bargaining. The novelty lay in putting them together on a screen.
The programmer enters the property business
Rusli arrived with a technical education. He studied computer science at Green River Community College from 2004 to 2006, then earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Purdue University in 2008. His subsequent work included software engineering at Motorola Solutions. He returned to Indonesia and became a software-development entrepreneur.
His earlier ventures included Global Ace Technology, where he was a co-founder, and Code-O Solutions, where he was a founder. In 2014, he began working with property company PT Surya Semesta Internusa. That connection brought his software experience into the orbit of the Suriadjaja family’s property business and the platform that became Travelio.
Travelio was founded in 2015 by Rusli, Christina Suriadjaja, and Christie Tjong. The combination matters. Technology can arrange a booking, while a property business has to deal with the physical thing being booked. Between those two worlds sit photographs, prices, contracts, furniture, and someone’s arrival time. A room cannot be downloaded.
The awkward year of changing direction
In October 2016, Rusli described the problem with the original market. Travelio had gained traction in hotel bookings, but it faced competitors selling the same inventory, with promotions doing much of the work. He questioned how durable that arrangement could be. The team consulted property specialists and investors before shifting towards privately owned accommodation.
The transition came with a measurable discomfort: traffic and other numbers fell as the company moved away from its hotel audience. Property transactions also remained heavily offline. Rusli’s challenge was to bring those habits onto a digital platform. His account of the change included the losses as well as the opportunity.
That is the revealing moment in his public story. The launch had made bargaining sound simple. Now he was discussing the cost of changing the business itself. A customer who wants a cheap hotel tonight does not automatically become a tenant who wants an apartment next month. The founders had to earn another kind of attention.
A pivot can look tidy in a timeline: one year, one arrow, one new label. Living through it involves running a company while its audience changes. Rusli’s description gives that arrow some weight. Travelio had to revise both what it offered and how people expected to buy it.
Somebody still has to turn the key
By August 2018, Travelio’s managed-property operation covered about 600 properties. It had been developing the model since 2016. Owners could bring a single apartment or a much larger portfolio. The company handled photography, listing content, distribution, and operations. Managed apartments had to meet its standards.
This added responsibilities beyond introducing an owner to a guest. Check-in and check-out had to happen. Cleaning was tied to those arrivals and departures, rather than supplied daily as in a hotel. Rusli was already describing a move towards longer rentals, with property sales a possible future extension.
There is something usefully unglamorous about this part of the story. An attractive listing begins a relationship; a usable apartment has to sustain it. The interface can promise ease, but the handover tests that promise. For a software-trained founder, the business had acquired a stubbornly physical last step.
Funding the stay beyond the weekend
Travelio announced a $4 million Series A in May 2018, led by Vynn Capital, with investors including Insignia Ventures Partners. At that point, it reported more than 4,000 platform listings. That inventory figure included listings; it was a different measure from the properties under direct management.
In November 2019, an $18 million Series B followed, co-led by Pavilion Capital and Gobi Partners. Travelio outlined plans to invest in marketing, staff, and additional services around the tenant’s stay. Interior design, everyday necessities, financing, payments, and logistics were among the possibilities it named.
“We strive to be the go-to internet platform to meet the living needs of all Indonesians regardless of their duration of stay.”
Hendry Rusli, November 2019
The phrase “duration of stay” carried the argument. A weekend traveller and a person renting for a year use accommodation differently. Their budgets, payment schedules, and expectations differ. Rusli’s stated ambition was to accommodate that range. In 2023, Travelio announced a further Series C round, with the amount undisclosed.
Leave the furniture out, let the tenant stay
In 2021, Travelio broadened its offer to unfurnished apartments and houses. Rusli explained that many owners bought apartments empty, making this a larger pool of potential properties to serve. The company’s earlier emphasis on fully furnished accommodation no longer defined every rental it could arrange.
For houses, the proposition included a minimum stay of three months and payment by the month. Rusli framed affordability and additional choice as objectives. He also expressed an ambition for Travelio to become an integrated property-management and rental technology company across Southeast Asia. That was an aspiration, with its operating story still centred on Indonesia.
Furniture is an unexpectedly good way to see the evolution. A furnished apartment invites someone to arrive with a suitcase. An unfurnished home leaves room for the tenant’s own belongings and decisions. Extending the offer meant serving people whose relationship with the address could be more settled.
An address is also a journey
In December 2022, Rusli signed a marketing partnership with MRT Jakarta. It brought approximately 524 apartments near MRT and commuter-line stations into a collaboration through the MRT-J application. The properties were about 1.3 to 2.4 kilometres from named MRT stations, including Bundaran HI, Dukuh Atas BNI, Fatmawati Indomaret, and Blok M BCA.
The distances deserve their place in the story. A floor plan tells a tenant how to live inside an apartment. A transport connection says something about the hours spent outside it. The partnership linked a housing decision to the practical geography of Jakarta. For Travelio, distribution now included a public-transport application.
The option he mentioned became a product
In November 2023, Travelio launched a property buying-and-selling platform. Five years earlier, Rusli had left that possibility open while discussing longer rentals. Now it had become an additional service. The company described a network of more than 15,000 property owners and an offer extending from temporary accommodation to ownership.
Travelio’s owner tools make the extension concrete. LioPartner lets an owner select a unit to sell, enter a price, and choose whether that price is fixed or negotiable. Other owner-facing services include monitoring bookings, reviewing unit-condition photographs, and seeing monthly reports. The business keeps returning to a familiar question: how much of managing a property can become easier to see and arrange?
Returning to the empty room
In October 2025, Travelio announced a partnership with Risland Indonesia involving Sky House BSD and Sky House Alam Sutera. Its responsibilities included marketing, rentals, maintenance, and digital reporting. In December, Perumnas also announced a collaboration with Travelio to manage rental apartments in its Samesta developments.
These partnerships bring Rusli’s work back to the owner holding a set of keys. A developer can deliver a building. A landlord can acquire a unit. Getting someone through the door, keeping the arrangement workable, and allowing the owner to follow what happens are continuing jobs.
Rusli’s public career traces a gradual widening of that responsibility: code, hotel bookings, private accommodation, management, longer leases, and sales. The cheerful bargaining pitch of 2015 survives as an early chapter. The later chapters concern the less theatrical business of making a place work for the people on either side of its door.
An apartment is patient. It will wait indefinitely for a tenant. An owner usually has a rather shorter attention span. Travelio’s business lives in the difference.