How Kimkim Is Building A Better Travel Experience With Their Marketplace

8 Apr 2022 · 3 min

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3:22

This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "How Kimkim Is Building A Better Travel Experience With Their Marketplace" (uploaded April 8, 2022). The excerpt is an interview-style exchange between two speakers (an interviewer and a KimKim representative) about challenges KimKim encountered as a travel marketplace. The speaker explains that simple aggregation of local specialists failed because many specialists lacked tools (they used Word/Excel and rudimentary notes), which hurt professionalism and trust. Over several years KimKim built a suite of tools for specialists — a communications platform, an itinerary builder for fast personalized itineraries, quick pricing and secure booking/payment features — effectively providing most of the specialists' toolchain to scale volume and improve traveler experience.

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So, you did kind of give us like a brief kind of overview of KimKim, but, you know, are there any kind of like non-obvious problems maybe that you're solving for, you know, like as a marketplace that, you know, we might not be aware of?
Yeah, so I think the initial idea for KimKim was really to vet the local specialists, so meet the local specialists, look at the trips they're doing, and decide kind of whether we want to bring them onto the platform or not. I think as we dug into that, we just found that aggregation model didn't really work very well for us. And I feel like that's the case with a lot of people getting into the marketplace. It seems like a very straightforward aggregation problem. And then you get into the marketplace and you find that many of the local specialists, for us at least, didn't really have the tools to be able to scale the way we wanted them to be able to scale. They were running their business on Excel, Microsoft Word. There was no tools to really create itineraries. There was no tools to really price out a trip for the traveler, right? And for travelers coming into who are planning a trip, those were like the first 2 questions that they would ask. Okay, that sounds great what we discussed on the phone. Can I see an itinerary? And it would take a long time for the specialist to put together that itinerary. And then the second question is, hey, I love the itinerary, what is the price, right? And it would take a long time for the specialist to put together the price, and that's just not what consumers expect today, right? So they're just used to everything is available very quickly, everything looks very professional. So dealing with specialists in Nepal or Bhutan, and the itineraries were just basically typed up notes. It just didn't create that level of trust and quality that travelers were expecting. So what we ended up doing was just taking on a lot more of the tools perspective for the specialists than we expected to initially. So over the past For years, we basically designed a communications platform for the specialists to be able to keep track of all the conversations they're having with the different travelers. We created an itinerary building system. So the key thing here at Kim Kim is that every itinerary is personalized, right? So how do we allow the specialists to create these personalized itineraries but very, very quickly? Because we are creating a lot of volume for the specialists. We created the ability to send pricing very quickly to the traveler to be able to collect the booking, collect the funds in a secure way. So we ended up taking over basically pretty much the whole toolchain for the specialists in order for them to be able to handle the volume of travelers to create personalized and professional itineraries and be able to take bookings securely on the platform.