Creating Customer Love In Tours & Activities | Customer Love Ep 5

This final episode of “Customer Love” fittingly covers tours and activities – the things travellers do in-destination. It’s the most exciting part of travel and it’s coming online at great speed, thanks to companies such as Booking.com which started building out their “connected trip” in 2019 and Klook which has been building up the sector in Asia Pacific for the past nine years.

We speak to two product chiefs, Austin Sheppard, Senior Vice President of Booking.com’s Trips Business Unit, and David Liu, Chief Product Officer of Klook, on the trends they are seeing, the products they are building and how they see technology such as AI and Augmented Reality changing the sector.

For David, who’d always been into tech, joining Klook in 2016 as VP of Product and UX, a year after it was founded, was a no-brainer. “I didn’t pick a startup, I picked Klook," he says during the episode, emphatically.

The founders’ passion and vision in wanting to bring experiences online and connect suppliers and travellers excited him. “I care a lot about customers, and they care about our customers as well.”

Meanwhile, Austin, quoting Booking.com’s Q3 2023 financial results, said that they “saw an increase in the percentage of transactions which we count as connected trips, meaning two or more travel components within a trip (though still small number of total transactions).

David also shared an experience about buying shoes online, which co-host Laura Houldsworth then extrapolated on, citing her own experience of an AR shoe fitting – which then led to a new idea that David said Klook would develop to ride on the growing trend of “costume dressing” among Asian travellers in destinations such as Japan and South Korea.

Have a listen for the reveal at the end.