You mentioned TourPlus, works on a model where you have a fleet of over 1700+ driver-guides on board with you. Can you explain how have you drawn this network and how is it different from a traditional Grab model where a customer can avail similar services.

We partnered with MDEC on eRezeki to help local people and train them how to use our digital platform and app to get jobs. Beside, drivers also refer to their colleague and friends by word of mouth.

Grab is an on-demand services provided to customer, mean customer and driver required to turn on their app at the same time to book a driver or received a job. For Tourplus, we allow customers to book in advance for days or months. Another different is Grab driver job is a point to point transfer, for Tourplus, we are providing services as charter car, day tour or multiple days tour that guide will stick with 1 customer for the entire journey.

Many startups in the travel space, lure consumers by offering deep discounts – That’s not an area on which TourPlus focusses. What segment of the customers you’re targeting.

We are targeting last minutes customers, who have already arrived at the hotel and want to find something to do for rest of the day, hence we partnered with the hotel which allows hotel guest to book our services last minutes. Once customer booked our system will confirm the guide within 2 hours to the customer, mean customer can book on the morning 9 am and guide will be pickup customer at 11 am, this is the speed that no OTA or traditional agency can promise.

You mentioned Indonesia, Australia, Europe among some top markets. Despite having an English only version how do customers discover you?

We target customers from those countries who have a specific interest in our services, normally customers discover us from Google search keywords.

During the course of your startup’s journey, you seem to have seen it all. You raised funds, scaled up the operations and are now working on a lean model where the focus is on revenues and bottom-lines. Thoughts on that?

A lot of startup founders only think the grand vision of being an entrepreneur is like  Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and others who got famous and rich when their startups get funded and IPO or exits. In reality, startup is a business which in the long run is needed to self-sustain. Of course, getting funded or IPO is the capital strategy for a startup and that is why it is fun and challenging for entrepreneur, but bottom-line is if your startup is not generating revenue or has potential to scale to global level, no investor is willing to invest into your startup.

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Asia is definitely set to take the travel industry by the horns. Tourist spending in the Asia-Pacific region is on a rising spree and continues to outgrow other regions in the world. In 2017, Asia-Pacific recorded a six percent growth, with 324 million international tourist arrivals. The growth is also expected to continue in 2018 at a rate of five to six percent.

Driven by a robust economic upswing and increased demand, many startups in the region are also making waves in the travel industry. With tech-driven differentiation, these startups, both big and small, are leveraging the boom in many different ways. Here is our top pick of some of the coolest startups.

1. Hotelogix, India

Many hotel groups in India run server-based management systems at their properties and lack centralized control at the corporate level. But not Hotelogix. With a mission to revamp the way the hospitality industry uses technology, Hotelogix aims at assisting hoteliers conquer the ever-changing hospitality landscape. What sets it apart from other PMS systems is the seamless flow of data. Cloud enables collecting data from multiple sources in real-time, giving you the ability to analyse this data in the moment. Recently, Hotelogix was recognized as a ‘FrontRunner’ in the hotel management category for enterprise vendors by Software Advice, powered by Gartner methodology.

2. RedDoorz, Indonesia

Launched in 2015, RedDoorz is a network of budget branded lodging, with more than 500 properties primarily in Indonesia, and also in Singapore and the Philippines. This year, it closed $11 million in new funding to expand its network of budget hotels and guest houses throughout the Southeast Asian region. As it stands in Indonesia, where RedDoorz has been the longest and where it has most of its properties — it claims to offer 3,000 rooms across 16 cities — the vast majority of customers are local and using the company’s Android app, rather than the tourist crowd. Some booking platforms are trying to creatively improvise their services by innovating around evolving customer needs, such as speed of booking, that RedDoorz particularly focuses on. The RedDoorz website is optimised to ensure that the booking form is displayed prominently on the landing page, which keeps guests focused on completing their booking.

3. Travelog, Malaysia

Built to be a one-stop shop for travellers in Malaysia and abroad, Travelog aims to make the process of researching and planning for itineraries easier for every traveller type.
Through the startup’s website, users are not only able to scan through an extensive list of travel activities, tour packages, and accommodations, but also avail weekly flash sales of up to 70 percent off booking prices. To make things even easier, users are not charged anything for the use of Travelog’s services. Within just one platform, travellers have access to a well-curated showcase of the startup’s hand-picked travel experiences.

4. GOeureka, Singapore

Blockchain is emerging as a strong technology tool that is all set to change the status quo of the travel industry. Banking on its subsequent adoption and tremendous growth potential, Singapore-based GOeureka is planning to launch their online hotel booking platform at the end of 2018, which will be utilising blockchain technology to deliver an industry-first solution that will disrupt the current OTA business model. This next-gen solution that will shape the future of online booking, will be built on top of the Ethereum platform, an open software platform based on blockchain technology that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications. GOeureka will challenge the status quo by removing hefty OTA commissions paid by hotels.

5. Concierge.io, Vietnam

Concierge.io, with its decentralized travel booking marketplace that utilizes the NEO blockchain, reduces third party interaction, whilst pledging a transparent operational process. The platform connects consumers directly with vendors to discuss their deals with no fee or commission associated. The Concierge.io marketplace UI (User-Interface) and UE (User-Experience) have been designed to give as much accessibility to both the vendor and consumers. The platform utilizes specific API’s to enable speed of transferring listings from other platforms providing maximum efficiency. Traditional payment methods like Visa/Master Card will be an option with top cryptocurrencies also added in due course.

The post Our pick of 5 Asian travel startups that you should look out for appeared first on TravHQ.

Do you live in Malaysia? Did you recently travel to the country? Are you planning to do that soon? If the answer is yes for any of these questions, you can take part in the #BeautifulMalaysia photo contest recently introduced by Tourism Malaysia. They are inviting people to share their Malaysia moments over Instagram or upload them to their website and they will pick a winner every week. The contest will run for 12 weeks starting from 15^th June till 20^th September.

Tourism Malaysia is strongly trying to promote the country as a prominent tourist destination. They have lined up various carnivals and events with multiple partners for this year. The #BeautifulMalaysia photo contest is open to people all over the world and with the hashtag being used throughout the campaign over social media platforms, it is sure to generate some buzz. This in turn will help promote multiple Malaysian destinations.

Participants are sharing some really beautiful pictures for the contest

You will have to submit your photos that capture the beauty of Malaysia in any of the following categories- places, festivals, food or shopping. To participate through Instagram, you will have to post the photos with #BeautifulMalaysia hashtag, a nice caption and tag malaysia.truly.asia. It goes without saying that the photos should be relevant to one of the categories. If you don’t use Instagram, you can participate through the website. The entries will be judged on the basis of creativity of the photograph, caption and its relevance to the category. The prizes include Canon EOS 100D DSLR, iPad Air 2, Oppo R5 mobile phone and GoPro Hero 4. There will be a different prize for each week so you can consider spreading out your entries across multiple weeks.

Apart from the photo contest, they will also introduce #BeautifulMalaysia postcards that will be distributed at selected airports across the country. The winning photos from the contest will be displayed on these postcards once the campaign comes to an end.

The campaign is working well for them and has already generated good amount of activity around the hashtag. The last time we checked, there were over 7K photos on Instagram with the hashtag #BeautifulMalaysia and on Twitter, the posts with the same hashtag generated over 180K impressions (Source: Tweetreach). This campaign is a good initiative by Tourism Malaysia and other destination marketers can also do something similar to promote the destination. You can browse the photos shared over instagram by following #BeautifulMalaysia.

So what are you waiting for? Pick your best Malaysia moments pictures and start posting.

(Featured image: Image by martin.coppola)

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