Since its inception in 2012, BeMyGuest has grown at a rapid pace to become one of the leading Asian tours & activities platform. Its expansion is the stuff of start-up dreams: in the last three months alone, the company has achieved a record growth of 100 percent and now offers over 10,000 activities in 600 destinations. I spoke to Blanca Menchaca, the Mexican-born chief operating officer and chief marketing officer for BeMyGuest, to find out where the company is headed next.
Free-to-list platforms aren’t new, but Menchaca doesn’t quite agree with any comparison to the US-based Viator or European-based GetYourGuide. BeMyGuest has its roots firmly in Asia and is, according to Menchaca, still breaking new ground in the region.
“The biggest distinction is in our supply,” she explained. BeMyGuest’s value proposition is that it offers the widest range of Asian activities to Asian travellers.
She acknowledges, however, that Asia does not comprise a single, unified culture – the region is diverse, made up of a multitude of languages and travellers from all backgrounds. The tours and activities sector is also fragmented: tour operators are predominantly small and medium-sized enterprises.
She said, “I don’t think there is any company that has fully conquered Asia. The markets and the nature and the behaviour of the traveller is very different [here]…no single strategy can be implemented across Asia.”
Menchaca believes that BeMyGuest has a wider, more regional reach than its rivals, including eOasia. “We are definitely one of [the platforms] with the highest potential to consolidate in the region,” she added. A key distribution partnership recently inked in North Asia but not yet public is set to further strengthen BeMyGuest’s leading position.
In the past year, the site has undergone a series of upgrades and redesigns, underpinned by improved search algorithms. All this has been in the service of making search and recommendations simpler for customers. The supplier end of the business has also seen a boost since the launch of its mobile application, Menchaca said. Additional promotional tools to manage last minute or early bird bookings are also now in use.
The goal, she stated, is to “help the industry grow their business through online channels.”
“They provide the activities, and we provide the technology and the distribution. We want to become an extension of the suppliers’ business.”
In the next six months, BeMyGuest will be targeting the most popular European destinations. Decisions on which tours and activities the company will purchase will be based entirely on choices made by Asian travellers. While growth has thus far been organic, the company is open to the idea of growth capital.
“We will consider capital from the right kind of partners,” Menchaca said. “However, we are looking not just for investments but for strategic partnerships.”
Does she find it easy being female in a male-dominated industry?
“I think there is a unique perspective you bring as a woman,” she said. Although the hours can be long, start-ups do offer flexible working hours that appeal to women with young children at home.
For someone who describes her work as intense but yet “not like work, because I am passionate about what I do,” she is unsurprisingly fond of the slow and deliberate art of Chinese tea appreciation. It is, she says, one of her favourite things to do in Singapore, alongside a tour of local religious sites. Asia has clearly gotten under the skin of this culturally astute operator.
