Discover how BeMyGuest empowers small tour package operators

Former Wego execs joined this $2m worth travel startup.

What about ballooning over Bagan, Myanmar, Safari Tour in Phuket, Thailand, and White Water Rafting, Elephant Ride and Spa Package in Bali? Those are just some quirky adventure that BeMyGuest has to offer.

Inspired by his business trip in Kenya and realized that he wanted to help local communities to truly benefit from tourism, Clement Wong put up BeMyGuest. BeMyGuest which bills itself as the current market leader in Southeast Asia in terms of inventory and traffic, empowers tours and activities providers with its free multi award winning content and booking management technology. Through this technology, tours and activities providers are able to digitalise and distribute their travel content to the entire travel industry (airlines, hotels, online travel agencies etc).

"A few years back I was in Kenya on a business trip. I extended my stay over the weekend to go on a safari. While at the Maasai Mara Reserve, I asked my driver if he could take me to a Maasai village. He told me it would cost $20, and I thought, sure, let’s help the local community. Once there, I was curious to find out how far the $20 would go in sustaining them and what they would spend it on. Sadly, a Maasai responded, ‘Sir, we do not get the $20. We only get $2. All the rest goes to the driver.’ Apparently, if he did not do so, the driver would simply take tourists to another village.” That inspired me to do something about it, to help local communities to truly benefit from tourism.”

Guided with their knowledge and networks in the travel industry, BeMyGuest started in March 2012 with the founder’s own funds and completed the first prototype in June 2012, while they received their first angel funding in July 2012.

Clement said that most tours and activities providers do not have the resources to invest into travel distribution technology. With BeMyGuest, they empower these tour and activity businesses (SMEs and individual operators) with their free content management technology for them to digitalize their products and grow their business online. Suppliers can organize their products, accept payments, track and respond to bookings, keep track of their customer information, and have access to tools tailored to the Asian market (SMS booking confirmation, comparison tools), all in one simple to use system.

“The main problem we are trying to solve is to aggregate the final frontier in travel distribution – tours and activities. All other segments of the travel industry have been aggregated, standardised, digitalized and distributed - airlines, hotels, car hire, local accommodation, trains, buses and taxis,” Clement added.

As they have began to expand to North Asia, BeMyGuest assured that by partnering with them, the travel industry gets free ancillary revenues post booking (flight, room, etc). By syndicating their content to the travel industry, BeMyGuest taps on the audience and traffic of its travel industry partners, thus getting free traffic and additional bookings.

Founder Clement, 36, serves as the CEO of the company while his business partner Blanca Menchaca, 32, serves as the CMO. Both of them are travel industry veterans and are from the travel technology space. Clement has done strategies and market research for the top travel companies of the world, and Blanca was the ex Global Head of Online Marketing at wego.com.

Their team also includes their CFO, Sandra Ho, an ex-head of Finance at Wego. But at BeMyGuest, Sandra establishes and maintains the company-wide financial objectives, controls, and practices. Holger Jehle, CTO, has PHD in Computer Science (Magna cum Laude) from Technical University of Munich. While Olalla Rey, is BeMyGuest’s head of content which is ex-head of Latin America Content, Expedia.com.

Clement said that in total they have received SGD1.935M of funding. “When we came in 2nd at Webintravel Startup of 2013, we received our first institutional investment from Tidesquare Korea. When we won the ChannelNewsAsia Startup Asia 2014 competition, we closed our seed round with TNF Ventures, and Tidesquare reinvested.”

According to Clement, new investors include strategic investors such as Adrian Ong, Head of Customer Experience, Match.com, and Woon Shung Toon, founder, The Analytics Company and CEO of Cornerstone Asia, acquired by NTT Data.

Coming onboard as investor and advisor through TNF Ventures is Foo Jixun, who is widely recognised as one of the top travel industry investors in Asia.Jixun is a partner at GGV Capital, and serves on the board of directors of Qunar (NASDAQ: QUNR), Youku-Tudou (NYSE: YOKU), Tujia, Grabtaxi, MediaV and Douguo. Jixun also actively participates in the businesses of HotelTonight, E Dian Bao and Meilishuo.com, UCWeb, AAC Technologies, Chaoli and Meihua (600873.SS). Historically Jixun helped to incubate Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) and Longcheer (SGX:L28) during their early pre-listed stages.

With this seed round of investment, BeMyGuest has opened a second office in Manila, and have been hiring across Asia. They have also closed distribution partnerships with some of the largest travel companies in the world.

Clement also shared that they aim to close their Series A round within the next 6 months so that they can cement themselves as market leader in the whole of Asia in the tours and activities space.

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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the Company: BeMyGuest
Founder: Clement Wong
Website: https://bemyguest.com.sg/
Total Funding at hand: S$1.935M
Source of Funding: Angel and Seed Funding
Major Investors: Tidesquare Korea, TNF Ventures
Start of Operation: March 2012

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]