Triptease in Singapore: bringing the Direct Booking Movement to Asia

From a basement to the best hotels in Singapore...

Triptease has come a long way since we launched Price Check back in 2015. We managed to grow out of our founder's basement pretty quickly, and since then the team has been journeying through a series of progressively bigger offices - first London, then New York, and now, since our Series B funding raise in April 2017, Singapore.

We've just about finished unpacking all of our Power Socks, so we thought now was as good a time as any to share our excitement about this new chapter in Triptease history...

The APAC team doing a fantastic job of not being distracted by the view... is that ocean we can see?

Triptease putting down roots in Asia is a Big Deal, according to new addition to the team Kimberly Chew. "Personally, I think Triptease is going to really shake up the travel and hotel industry in the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region. Asian Millennials account for 60% of the world's millennials, and hotels that manage to capture the AMTs (Asian Millennial Travellers) are going to be the ones that win out. The industry here is ripe for disruption, and I think Triptease is going to be a big part of that."

Already partnered with some of the region's leading brands, the Triptease team are keen to keep spreading the word on direct bookings. In a region where parity agreements between OTAs and hotels are often disregarded or even non-existent, hotels can struggle to prove to guests that they have the best price. And then there's Ctrip - the OTA juggernaut with a seemingly unshakeable hold on the Chinese travel market. So, we've been touring the continent spreading the #DirectIsBest message: managing parity and advertising it to guests should be top of any hotelier's to-do list. Guests should never have to pay a premium to book direct.

The Triptease team well and truly setting up shop in Singapore

And then there's live chat. Two of the top three social apps in south-east Asian countries are messaging platforms, and a reputed 41% of China’s population log into WeChat (the “app for everything”) every day. Writing in Forbes, entrepreneur Vinnie Lauria notes the key difference between messaging in Asia and other regions. In Europe or the United States, Lauria contends, chat and in-app messaging “are often seen as a natural extension to social networks.” In Asia, “the reverse is more common: messaging apps are the utilities whence social networks emerge from.” It’s no surprise, then, that for many Asian consumers it feels as natural to book a hotel room with a message as it does to do it over the phone. Triptease's Front Desk live chat tool has hit the ground running in the APAC region, while our European clients utilising Front Desk report that it is most popular amongst travellers from Asia.

We don't know about you, but we're beyond excited about this new era of Triptease. Keep an eye out for us at events across Asia in the months to come - or drop us a message if you want to get to know the Singapore team!

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