Competitively priced subscription-based model may upend traditional ticketing businesses and personalize customer experiences.
A Singapore-based technology provider for the tourism industry is leveraging new digital technologies and rolling out an omni-channel ticketing solution to unlock and drive the growth of Asia tourism. The integrated solution encompasses point-of-sales and direct online bookings, as well as through a network of over 2,000 travel agents.
GlobalTix, winner of the 2019 Singapore Tourism Board’s “Best Business Innovation Award”, has been gaining market traction with its innovative technology that aggregates all attraction tickets into one single instant e-ticket to cover a traveler’s entire needs—via a single QR code.
Using software that is developed in-house and cloud-based, GlobalTix places attraction owners and niche operators in good stead to tap a huge growth opportunity: Rising demand for instant e-tickets and greater convenience for travelers. Driven by increasing mobile adoption, more new-age, discerning travelers are turning to mobile platforms to book their holiday plans, mostly at the last minute. Indeed, two in five bookings are made on the day or two days before a trip, using mobile applications.
GlobalTix, which last year raised another S$12.5 million to spur its regional expansion, issues one ticket every 10 seconds, generating total ticket value in excess of S$150 million annually. Operating in five offices across Asia, GlobalTix is now broadening its business model from a marketplace for tours and activities to a partner-of-choice that helps attraction owners drive sales.
Industry transformation ahead
GlobalTix is upending the conventional ticketing industry. The big trend in Tours & Activities is travelers are increasingly going online. However, at present more than 80% of tours and activities globally continue to be booked offline, while 90% of bookings are still handled manually. This is due to the high initial investment required to adopt technology.
Said Mr Chan Chee Chong, GlobalTix’s Chief Executive Officer: “By introducing a subscription-based solution, we aim to plug this gap and help attraction owners and niche operators with their digitalization journey, which will in turn enable them to sell more eventually.” With the competitive subscription price, niche operators can easily access such technology and provide a wider range of tourism offerings such as food journeys, meditation classes and overnight squid fishing experiences. This will allow the marketplace to be filled with many interesting experiential or culturally-rich activities that are highly sought after by travelers.
In addition, GlobalTix’s cloud technology can be customized to enable attraction owners to deliver a personalized experience. The world’s first NERF Action Xperience theme park adopted their solution: Customers are uniquely identified at the beginning of their journey—online booking, self-help kiosks, point-of-sales and turnstiles, rental of lockers, game-play and purchase of souvenir photos—right until the end of their travel experience.
Additionally, attraction owners can tap GlobalTix’s global distribution channels of over 2,000 travel partners to augment business. The firm counts global B2C players like TripAdvisor, Voyagin, Ctrip and Expedia as its customers, who in turn have access to over 80,000 products from 120 cities listed on GlobalTix’s marketplace – one of the largest in Asia. The platform’s Channel Manager solution empowers operators not just by connecting them directly to travel partners, but allows them to determine unique pricing for different agents so as to maximize revenue. Other benefits include improving operational efficiencies through an easy on-boarding process and training, and recognizing different online travel agencies’ vouchers through a single platform.
Smarter marketing with data analytics
Currently, attraction owners and operators have to pull their sales records from multiple sources, such as online and offline sales platforms, to gain visibility of total sales. But with GlobalTix’s solution, they can now obtain real-time sales figures at-a-glance on a singular consolidated platform, according to their requirements, including their sales on the GlobalTix marketplace.
More importantly, GlobalTix provides attraction owners with market insights including travel, utilization and forward purchase patterns. Such data will in turn enhance marketing programs.
