Malaysia's Zouba wants to become a meta-book marketplace for destination products

Malaysia-based GoQuo, which calls itself an “airline’s best friend” helping them sell ancillary revenues, has taken the plunge into the tours and activities space by launching Zouba (meaning “let’s go” in Mandarin), a “meta-book marketplace” for destination products.

“We’re an intelligent metasearch platform for tours and activities, making us unique compared to other players in the market. Unlike other metasearch platforms and aggregators, we allow instant booking for all of our products through our Integrated Partners, so we are more of a meta-book marketplace,” says Prasanna Vee, chief product officer of GoQuo.

“We’re convinced that this is a game-changer for the user acquisition model in the tours and activities space - just like how Kayak, Skyscanner and Trivago changed the discovery flow for other sectors over a decade ago.”

Curious to understand more about its claims about being a metasearch as well as meta-book marketplace in this highly complex and fragmented sector, WiT asked the following questions of Vee.

To your point on being an intelligent metasearch platform for tours and activities: Creating a comprehensive metasearch for tours and activities requires significant aggregation of supply from several vendors who are able to provide real-time availability and various pricing models. I am wondering how you tackle pricing comparison for some of the main selling attractions and theme parks where there is only one supplier with limited product(s)?

For example, Universal Studios Singapore has controlled rates by the operator Resorts World Sentosa; the same applies for many other theme parks, aquariums, museums. This is unlike hotels and flights where products are homogeneous (many rooms in many hotels in the same destination/many seats on the same airline). Metasearch works also on the basis of dynamic pricing, most suppliers still work out on flat annual rate cards. How are you overcoming these challenges?

Good question. At this early stage, our meta-model focuses more on aggregating as much supply into one place as possible. We have not yet gotten into tackling “clustering” similar products (and de-duping them) to identify the supplier selling the best rate for the clustered product like how hotels do.

Meaning, in the hotels sector it is very easy to find that multiple suppliers (like Agoda, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com) are all referring to the same hotel like "Hilton Kuala Lumpur" and group them together and show the best rates from these in a metasearch (like TripAdvisor, Trivago or HotelsCombined do).

However, in the activities sector, it is not that easy (yet) to identify that multiple suppliers (like GetYourGuide, Klook, Viator, etc.) are actually referring to the same product like "Universal Studios Singapore" as their products are titled, labeled and packaged quite differently.

We are in the process of addressing this via building some intelligent clustering algorithms that will group all similar tours (like: "KL Tower admission ticket" or "Berlin TV Tower entry," etc.) and present the users with a simpler user experience to pick and choose the best combo that suits their taste and need. First stage will be only clustering and presenting them in groups. Second stage will be intelligently de-duping and choosing the "best price" option. This will be launching very soon (mostly in the coming quarter) and will be a big unique value proposition for Zouba – on the search and discovery front.

On the dynamic pricing aspect – Zouba has logic to dynamically change the price of products based on the channel it distributes (as we plan to work with other partners like hotels and airlines). The price elasticity would be decided based on the distribution channel, and the kind of users that are viewing on those channels.

To your point “unlike other metasearch platforms and aggregators, we allow instant booking for all our products through our integrated partners”: For years players in Asia and globally have been focusing on solving the “instant booking” booking problem. How have you been able to solve this for traditional travel activities business not adopting technology?

For example, how does a tuk tuk driver deliver instant booking? I understand that brands like Traveloka offer 90% instant booking and most online B2B aggregators and reservation systems offer 100% instant booking fulfillment. How do you differentiate Zouba in this respect, if your unique selling proposition is instant booking as well?

To be very honest, we are not solving the problem per se. We are relying on our supply partners who are working hard on filling this gap gradually. While OTAs like Kkday or Klook might have a mix of instantly bookable products, as well as products that require "manual follow-up and fulfillment," we are connected only to products from our partners that are instantly bookable. We don’t consume or distribute products that are not instantly confirmable (there might be some minor exceptions, but for most parts that is what our partners stream to us).

What I was referring to in this context was other meta search players like TourScanner or TouringBird (by Google) who aggregate destination products from multiple suppliers eventually redirect users to the partner OTA sites. But we are the only ones who actually do an on-platform booking directly, like how Skyscanner tries to do this for a few (very select) airlines (a meta-book model). We allow such in-marketplace booking for 280,000-plus products, which I think is quite impressive.

Volcano boarding in Nicaragua: I did this at a time when tours and activities were not online. I had to spend hours researching and hours working with offline tour operators. Little did i know that there was an interesting volcano in Nicaragua (Mt. Cerro Negro) along the slopes of which you could do “ash” boarding/volcano boarding. Same in Qatar. Now it is so easy to load Viator or Klook or Zouba and find these in a few seconds.

To your point about being a game-changer in the user acquisition model in the tours and activities space - AirAsia, Expedia, Traveloka and Klook have built a massive user base, some of them with the advantage of having customers with hotels or flights being pre-booked. How much funding do you have to invest to build a sizable audience and in which markets will you be able to scale? Are you a bit too late in the B2C frenzy?

While we will be doing some calculated investments in acquiring traffic to the Zouba marketplace – and also apply growth hacks for organic traffic – our focus is not just on B2C distribution. We are built from the ground up to work with other established partners (airlines and hotels with high volume of users) and so expect to gain traffic from those sources gradually. This is the way we plan to also strengthen our machine learning algorithms by signals acquired from cross markets/sources. Our intention is certainly not to get into the B2C frenzy at this point.

Why in your opinion have the giant metasearch companies globally not jumped on the bandwagon of travel activities? They have the audience, tech and funding, after all. Why do you think they have stayed away or do you think they will also now jump into this metasearch/book model for activities?

This is another great question, with no straight answer. Companies like Kayak have tried this in the past, but not found success due to various reasons – including the point I made above around how complex and diverse the product (options) are!

But now we are in a different world with tours and activities getting more and more exposure by the day. While they can enter this space now and start building from scratch, it might be better for them to partner with someone like us who has done all the heavy lifting already to get into a win-win scenario. In fact, we are already in talks with a couple of popular metasearch companies in this part of the world to fuel their tours and activities vertical, and hopefully you would be able to see that soon.

* This article originally appeared on WebInTravel.