ASIA’S market for peer-to-peer tours and activities is just beginning to heat up as the region’s travellers and industry suppliers warm to the idea of such products going digital.
Clement Wong, founder and CEO of Singapore-headquartered BeMyGuest.com.sg, said: “Tours and activities are just like where the airlines, hotels and car rentals were 10-15 years ago, the aggregation, standardisation and digitalisation.”
Wong elaborated to TTG Asia e-Daily: “Only after the likes of Airbnb where people became comfortable with booking with locals did people begin to look for activities online.
“Tours and activities are the final frontier of travel distribution as everything else – hotels, airlines, car rentals – are already being sold in the space.”
He said the tours and activities space in Asia is two to three years behind Europe, and this segment had been singled out as the hottest trend in Europe and the US at ITB Berlin in March this year.
“It’s a matter of creating awareness that it is possible to have a platform to search for tourism activities. Right now if you’re looking for tours and activities, all you do is search and choose from the results. Very often the websites are very badly done and you are afraid to give them your credit card details. So similarly to the chain hotels and airlines with brand.com, we are basically an OTA for tours and activities.
“So once we have aggregated the product we can do the same model like booking and affiliate white label network to other OTAs or hotels, and so on. Our logic is, you have the eyeballs and we have inventory, let’s make some revenue.”
BeMyGuest works differently from similar tours and activities booking portals in the West by giving their supplier partners its content management technology that allows them to do invoicing, booking management, data analytics to see where the customers are coming from and which products are most looked at.
“Rather than they having their website trying to do SEO, search engine marketing, we’re saying this is free technology for you, list with us and we’ll do the rest of the work. We are peer-to-peer but we magnify marketing efforts through the travel ecosystem.”
The company generates revenue by obtaining inventory at wholesale price from the suppliers in exchange, which is then marked up, or by agreeing on a commission level where a rack rate is decided on.
Wong said the company is expanding its team and is due to open its second office in the Philippines. It ranks first in the region for inventory and traffic. It acquired Indiescapes in January, and recently won regional news broadcaster Channel NewsAsia’s Start-UP Asia Competition (TTG Asia e-Daily, January 15, 2014).
