Kimkim studied what their best travel specialists did, then built tools to help everyone else do the same thing. They added itinerary builders and in-platform calling to reduce friction and boost conversions on high-value bookings.
Chapters
This is great. This is exactly what I wanted to jump into as far as building tools for the supply side of your marketplace. So I'm really interested to learn more about, like, at what stage though did you start kind of introducing some of those tools and kind of productizing them with your marketplace? And just for a little bit of context, we have a lot of earlier stage marketplaces here in the community, and they're thinking about how they can kind of build SaaS tools for their supply side.
Yeah, I think we started that pretty quickly. I think initially the supply side were sending PDFs and the PDFs were very rough, I would say. They're mostly text and it just took a long time for them to be able to create these itineraries. So we basically said, hey, that's— and we could see that, right? One of the things that we really looked at was what are the things that really improve the overall conversion rate on the platform. So some specialists were converting very well and some specialists were converting not well at all, right? And what is that spread and why is there such a big difference in the spread? And then as you drill into that, you start seeing different types of behavior from the specialists, right? So the specialists who were converting well, one of the things they were doing was was actually sending an itinerary with their first message. But, and then the specialists who were not converting so well, it took them 2 or 3 days to put together the itinerary to send it to the traveler. So where we were starting to talk about, so how can we take the best behaving specialist behavior and then pushing it through all of our specialists, right? And we saw that, hey, the top behaving specialists had some tools, right? They used third-party tools to generate their itineraries. So That gave us the confidence, hey, if we were able to replicate this for all of our specialists, we can see a lift in the overall conversion rate. So we started very simple. I think our first version of the itinerary building tools was very simple. So bringing some of their content onto the platform and allowing them to reuse it. Of course, 4 years later, our tools are much more sophisticated, right? So as you learn more and as you sort of iterate on the tools. The tools get better and better over time. But I think just drilling into kind of the difference in behaviors and really looking for where are the bright spots in your conversion really helps you identify what are some of the areas that you should invest in product. Another example I wanted to share around sort of digging into where you should invest in product Another one was making phone calls, right? So these people are booking $6,000 trips, $8,000 trips to a foreign destination with someone that they've never talked to before, right? So how do they create that level of trust to book a $6,000 trip with the specialist? One thing we found was that a phone call made a big difference, right? You can hear the specialist, you can ask questions, you can feel confident about the specialist that's planning the trip for you. But that was a very difficult thing to do. What we saw, the specialists who were using phone call to convert the trips, they were sending messages like, hey, we can use Skype to do a phone call. Here's my Skype ID. And the traveler was like, what's Skype, right? And they're like, go to this link, download Skype. So it was very, very complex to make that phone call happen. And we looked at that and said, hey, that is a conversion driver. how do we encourage this type of behavior in all of our specialists? So we actually built a calling system on the platform where we made it much easier to collect the phone number for the traveler. And then for the specialist, it just became like click the link to call the traveler and the phone call will go through, right? So that whole friction point of, yeah. creating like a meeting time, like what time zone are you in? All of those things disappeared. And it is now just one of the best practices that we encourage specialists to do. Just pick up the phone and call your traveler if there's any misunderstanding or not clear communications of what the trip looks like. It's much easier just to have a quick call on the phone.
