Southeast Asia's Fragmented Tours Sector Gets Long-Awaited Tech Upgrade
Skift Take
When you think of Southeast Asia, one automatically assumes the region is largely tech-enabled with its super-app culture and payment wallets that leapfrogged traditional banking; all fluidly switched on for digital purchases. But this couldn't be further from the truth for the tours and activities landscape across the region.
Southeast Asia's experiences sector is decades behind the hotel industry in terms of technology adoption, while Singapore operated major attractions, like its Universal Studios at Sentosa Resorts, without any application programming interface (API) connectivity.
Riding the tail end of pandemic recovery, the region continues to see a significant digital boom, forcing changes to how experiences are being booked and planned, as consumer purchasing habits are driven by digital connectivity, now more than ever.
In Southeast Asia specifically, the shift to online lifestyle services spiked in 2021, according to trends detailed in Google's SEA 2022 Economy Report. And while digital adoption is normalizing for the travel sector, from 58 percent uptake in 2021 to four percent in the first half of 2022, the region's digital travel economy is expected to grow by 20 percent year-on-year by 2025.
Skift spoke to a few industry experts in the business-to-business (B2B), API connectivity space, and consumer-facing tours and activities, online travel agencies, and marketplaces to understand how they're finally using tech to transform the travel experiences sector.
Southeast Asia's Destination-Specific Dominant Platforms"The upside of the pandemic is that it has accelerated the pace of adoption. Everybody thinks that Asia is tech-enabled, but when it comes to the travel activity space, it's a very different story. We have to remember that a very traditional and offline sector is coming online," said Blanca Menchaca, co-founder CEO of BeMyGuest, a connectivity and distribution platform for tours and activities operators in the region.
BeMyGuest data estimated the global value of the tours and attractions sector to be $150 billion, with 40 percent of that $60 billion transacting in Asia. Yet, only 20 percent of the region's experiences sector is online.
She added that recovery has been much faster for the companies who adopted tech solutions during the Covid period, noting that before Covid, prominent offline trav
