How “the connected trip” is evolving in Booking.com and how Klook is solving local pain points
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, interim 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.
But first, both are of the opinion that you have to believe in the product first, use it yourself to see it through the customer’s eyes before you can create “Customer Love”.
Austin first joined Amazon in 2008 “because I was so impressed with a personal customer experience I had with Amazon at the time (a broken camera that they replaced no questions asked transformed my expectations around great customer service!)”.
Listen to the episode here
Responsible for “everything but the stay” – flights, rental cars, airport taxis, attractions, and insurance, Austin joined Booking.com in May 2021 as VP Engineering. “Whilst I am a lifelong passionate traveler, I was not a customer of Booking.com when I first decided to join the business in 2021 – largely because my preference is to book a flight first, and build out the rest of my trip around that – on the same platform as the flight where possible. Booking.com’s flights business launched in 2019 and didn’t offer this capability to customers like me in pre-pandemic years. We do now.”
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.”
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.”
With that customer lens, Klook has built deeply local products across its markets – David cites the example in Japan of the Japan Rail Pass which can be complicated to use for foreign visitors and how Klook solved, step by step, problems for inbound travellers.
“I think it really helps to be a passionate user, when you want to build a product,” he says. “Understand the pain point and then try to go beyond expectations.”
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).
“In Q3 air tickets booked increased 57% y/y driven by the growth of Booking.com’s flight offering. To provide some context on how this has developed over the last few years, the nine million tickets booked on our platforms during Q3 were more than five times the number of air tickets booked through us in Q3 2019.”
Both executives also talk about the importance of payments in solving local problems and increasing conversions.
According to Austin, “about 51% of Booking.com’s gross bookings were processed through our payments platform in Q3 2023, up from about 40% in Q3 2022. For the total company, 56% of gross bookings were merchant, up from about 45% in Q3 2022.”
David meanwhile 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.
