Event tourism and slow travel factoring high in Travel Pulse survey
Sarah Wan: “I’ve become a calmer captain because I know what my ship can weather, and how hard I can push it without turning back.”
When you’re working for a high growth company like Klook, it is important to practise self-care regimes, said Sarah Wan, general manager, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, such as keeping to a good fitness regime and “an annual “retreat to switch off and evaluate whether I still like what I’m doing”.
Speaking at WiT Indie in Penang last week, she said, “This usually happens in July because it’s a more off-peak month for South-east Asia.”
And this year, she is off to South Africa for the first time, taking in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kruger National Park and Karongwe Private Game Reserve as well as Victoria Falls. She is most excited about the “Carnivore Conservation Experience” at Karongwe Private Game Reserve in the Greater Kruger Park where visitors get to meet with a researcher from the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Cheetah Metapopulation Project, managed by National Geographic grantee Vincent van der Merwe.
She certainly needs these breaks because she has been through the grind with Asia’s leading tours and activities marketplace. She joined them in 2017 from communications firm, Edelman, in consumer marketing and went through a baptism by fire during the pandemic, when she proved her mettle earning an accolade in local media, CNA Luxury, as “the woman behind Klook’s success story during the pandemic”.
Although she clarifies it was very much a team effort, she said that she’s been “fortunate” enough to be presented with blank slates twice.
“The first was exciting – really figuring out how to position the brand in the market, building a team from scratch. There was headspace to sketch on the canvas before painting on it, which back then for me, was a marketer’s dream.
“The second, which was COVID, was frightening to say the least. I’ll never forget the feeling where my stomach sank when I saw our revenues dip to negative. But it forced us to think like business owners and really do anything to stay relevant.
“Amazing things happen when you’re pushed out of your comfort zone. We could pursue product innovations and collaborations that we typically wouldn’t have if not for the “blank space” created by the pandemic such as partnering with Cinewav to do crazy things like setting up a cinema on top of Marina Bay Sands and opening up the opportunity for cruise.”
She said, “I’ve become a calmer captain because I know what my ship can weather, and how hard I can push it without turning back.”
Klook and Cinewav screenings at Marina Bay Sands Sky Park: “Amazing things happen when you’re pushed out of your comfort zone.”
Destination content more important than follower count
In the past seven years that Wan has been with the company, Klook has certainly taken off like a rocket ship, from 200+ activities in 2014-2015 to over half a million across 2,700 destinations, and 140m trips booked in 2024, which incidentally marks its 10th anniversary.
Said Wan, “I’m never bored. Every year at Klook has truly been quite different and I think sometimes we surprise ourselves by what we can pull off, fuelled constantly by like-minded folks who are always thinking about what we can be doing better and growing.
“I think the uniquely amazing thing is knowing that you have a team that is not afraid to attempt what seems impossible. For example, Taylor Swift was a pretty mad project that we managed in a matter of about a month. When we say jump, everyone does just say how high.”
And numbers are certainly staying high in the period post-pandemic. Although the days of “revenge travel” are over and things have come down to some form of normalcy, Wan said that travellers are generally good with spending more “but they’ve become more ‘choiceful’ about what they spend on. We’re seeing them spend a lot more on cultural activities especially – deep-diving into history, clothing, ways of living rather than scratching the surface of doing the must-dos.
“There’s an added intensity to the definition of “trending” destination and an increasingly clearer swing towards destinations that dominate feeds especially after COVID. Last year for Singapore, it was Jeju, this year for Singapore and Malaysia, it’s China and for Malaysia and Indonesia, Vietnam.”
She herself is influenced heavily by social media – “I keep a saved list on IG and use that to spark off trip ideas” – and she said these days, “the heart of it is destination content”.
“With the introduction of new casual content creation platforms like Tiktok and community-driven ones like Little Redbook (Xiaohongshu), more and more we were seeing that follower count didn’t matter.”
Speaking about the Klook Content Creators programme and working with influencers, Wan said, “The idea behind Klook Kreator was to really engage not just the macro influencers but the micro or nano ones – those who are good at creating good content or crafting genuine recommendations.
“Our commission model gives our Kreators ownership and direct returns depending on how well their content is received rather than having to negotiate for direct flat fees. We’re seeing that a lot of this more organic and personable content perform a lot better than traditional branded content that costs a lot to produce when we run them as ads.”
According to a survey done by Klook, when asked if they’ve ever booked an experience based solely on a social media recommendation or post by a content creator, 84% of people in APAC said yes.
“Videos are the new search (especially short form) – less and less preference for long-form travel blogs.”
Muslim-friendly tours in Japan are selling well on Klook: An example of customising at scale while being sensitive to needs of specific traveller groups.
Klook keeps focus on product amid increased competition
And as more OTAs enter the tours and activities space – Booking, Agoda, Trip and Traveloka – distribution is being concentrated in the hands of these major platforms. Is this a healthy trend for independent travel providers, we asked.
Said Wan, “I don’t necessarily see it as being concentrated, it’s just that tours and activities are getting more and more attention online. For products that maybe you would only previously consider in-destination, or have to search high and low to find, or perhaps not even discover at all, they are getting earlier and more travel budget share.”
At the same time, a variety of players with different niches are emerging “like Seek Sophie, who I respect tremendously, is very focused on tours that go off the beaten track”.
Klook’s focus is on the product. “Platform-wise, we are always seeing how we can ease the understanding of complex information that comes with dabbling in tours. Tour/activity product wise, what’s different? How can we “customise” at scale while being sensitive to the needs of specific traveller groups?
“For example, we now have female drivers in Bali to cater to female travellers and Muslim travel tours in Japan, where we try to include halal-certified restaurants and mosques as part of the stops.”
Her advice to smaller tours and activities providers on how to work with Klook:
- Be open to trying new things. “I think our most successful partnerships have come about with merchants who are most willing to tweak their operations based on our data-driven recommendations.”
- Be customer obsessed. “Service matters and we take customer feedback seriously.”
- Challenge and surprise us. “If you have an idea, bring it to the table and we’ll see how we can make it work.”
In terms of most interesting travel trends, she cites two from Klook’s Travel Pulse survey:
- 43%: Event tourism (visiting for specific events e.g. music festivals, concerts, Olympics
- 38%: Slow travel (staying in one location and fully immersing)
In a marketing test, AI-generated campaign won
Wan also spoke about how Klook is using AI in marketing – from the norm such as content generation, translation and visuals – and it recently ran an experiment testing an AI marketing campaign against a human-generated campaign. “Guess which one won?” she asked the audience, most of whom guessed correctly, “AI.”
“We are experimenting now with AI talent and video, but personally I feel it’s not quite there yet. I’m an old soul who still believes in authenticity (for now). It’s important to understand that AI won’t replace jobs, it will replace skills. We’re helping our workforce upgrade their skills, training linguists (something that AI can do easily now) to become content editors.”
Klook has also integrated its K.Ai chatbot to enable customers to make informed decisions. It has seen increased levels of customer services with K.Ai’s capability to manage up to four times more queries coming in and achieved 15% increase in accuracy of responses to customers.
As to how she’s personally using AI and what parts of her job has it replaced to free her to do more fun stuff, she said, “My job is a lot more thinking-related than operations-related, so to be quite frank, I don’t really use AI in my day to day. I also like to exercise my writing muscle once in a while so thus far I’ve been quite resolute about drafting things on my own.”
Lastly, the human quality she wants to improve about herself? “Have more energy.”
Which we are sure she will have after the trip to South Africa and being inspired by cheetahs, which incidentally, is the fastest land mammal and according to National Geographic, the fastest of them all is named Sarah, clocking in at 61 miles an hour (98 km/h)) in 2012, when she was 11 years old.
Sarah, the fastest cheetah in the world. Photo credit: Wikipedia (National Geographic)