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.
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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.