With a strong presence across key Asia-Pacific markets, KKday Singapore is a leading mobile-first e-commerce travel platform for local experiences. KKday’s main objective is to make travel more accessible, convenient, and safe. The success of KKday is built on innovation, a unique product portfolio, and digital-first capabilities, all made possible by their exceptional team. Wei Chun Liu, Co-Founder, KKday, looks forward to elevating their presence in India with enriching travel packages and leisure product offerings. They are confident that they will be well-received in the India market.
– Prashant Nayak
KKday currently hosts over 30,000 travel and leisure products and services in over 80 countries and 500 cities. In addition, many of KKday’s products are APAC-centric and focused on countries such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. KKday covers an extensive range of products, from attraction tickets to transportation to SIM cards, cruises, and staycations. With multilingual websites and mobile apps, KKday supports both traditional and simplified Chinese and English, Japanese, Korean, and many others.
At KKday, they try to understand the supplier and customers’ needs and bridge that gap with marketing or technology features. They have a mobile application for consumers to ask questions and communicate with suppliers. For offline agents or DMCs, they have a separate booking system for them to serve their customers.
“We began operations in 2014, but the supply chain was not yet ready. Bookings were processed manually by the majority of suppliers. We had to educate the suppliers as well as the users on the advantages of the automation process, which has now supplanted all other booking methods. Today, with COVID being an accelerator, many suppliers are actively working with us to promote their products to overseas customers through our digitally active platform, which fulfils all their travel needs in one click,” says Liu.
Since they also need to partner and collaborate with several travel experience providers, it’s quite challenging as they manage over 300k products today. In addition to the usual marketing campaigns and promotions, where they do content and digital marketing for their suppliers, they also use technology to promote those suppliers with good quality. For example, suppliers with positive reviews, quick response time, and capacity will get higher ranking and more marketing resources.
As a result of COVID-19, domestic tourism is on the rise in every country. Domestic tourism, according to Liu, is just as vital as outbound tourism for any country. They had realised its impact even more during the pandemic when the international borders were shut. Liu says, “We pivoted our model to domestic travel quite early, back in early February 2020. Since then, we have been able to cater to domestic demand. Now that the borders have reopened, we can take that domestic inventory and sell it to foreign tourists. As per the latest trend, young gen would like to experience things like a local and we at KKday provide access to those experiences.”
As a pioneer in the digitisation of tours, activities, and attractions, the KKday digital team has to be very innovative while constantly adding new services. “We take pride in being suppliers’ partners. We try to understand their needs and create solutions around them. All technology or digitisation should be based on suppliers’ needs and behaviours. Our team ensures that digital strategy is different for different suppliers, as they cater to various markets and have separate target audiences. The digital team ensures that our strategy and innovation are built to promote our supplier’s products effectively,” shares Liu.
KKday recognises the potential of the India market and has appointed AVIAREPS as its sales, marketing, and PR representative in India, to expand its presence in the India market. Along with AVIAREPS India, they plan to promote KKday in India to the B2B market to have easy access to numerous attractions and tours on their platform. Through online and offline training, networking events, and emphasising the platform’s USPs, they are educating trade partners about KKday’s product offerings. They also take part in roadshows with various tourism boards to promote the tours and attractions of each destination separately. Their goal is to target India outbound to various countries and vice versa.
“We would also be collaborating with the inbound industry to expand KKday’s wings in the India market and placing the portal for both international and domestic travellers. Many travel agents have the best deals in accordance with the current needs of the market and have the potential to showcase and sell the same. Working with both outbound and inbound players will allow us to learn the consumers’ needs and travel trends in a better way,” informs Liu.
KKday expects revenge travel for the next 12 months. This means suppliers will have to transition from hibernation to high demand in a short period of time. As technology plays an important role in the tourism industry, they will need tech solutions and a diverse source of inventory more than ever. KKday being a one-stop travel provider, it allows continuous communication and streamlines the guest experience, from reservation to checkout.
