BeMyGuest - Tours & Activities

For most of travel's digital revolution, the booking button belonged to flights and hotels. You could reserve a room in Osaka from a phone in Ohio years before you could reliably buy a ticket to the aquarium next door to it. Tours and attractions - the "things to do" once you land - stayed stubbornly analogue: a printed voucher, a queue at the counter, a spreadsheet in the back office. BeMyGuest, a Singapore company founded in 2012, built itself around that gap.

The pitch is deliberately plain. In the company's own words, it "develops tech solutions for the travel activities sector that empower operators of all sizes to sell better online." No talk of disrupting travel. Just the unglamorous work of connecting the operator who runs a river cruise to the thousand travel agents who could fill its seats.

01 / The problemAn industry that ran on paper

Picture a mid-sized attraction in Southeast Asia: a wildlife park, say, or a theme park on the edge of a city. On any given day it sells to four completely different kinds of buyer. There's the online traveller who found it on a search engine. The walk-in who shows up at the gate. The travel agent booking on behalf of a tour group. And the corporate client buying a block of tickets for staff. Historically, each of those channels needed its own process, its own pricing sheet, its own reconciliation at the end of the day.

That fragmentation is the problem BeMyGuest set out to collapse. Instead of four systems, one. Instead of chasing confirmations by email, instant confirmation and e-tickets. Instead of a static rate card, real-time product updates and multi-currency pricing.

02 / How it worksThe pipes, not the storefront

The strategic choice that defines BeMyGuest is what it decided not to be. It is not the consumer brand you book your day trip on. It is the layer underneath the brands you do book on. On one side sit the operators with inventory. On the other sit the agents, resellers and online travel agencies that reach travellers. BeMyGuest is the marketplace and the plumbing between them.

Being the pipes has a quiet advantage: you can supply everyone, including your would-be competitors. In 2023 the company became an approved Google partner, feeding tours-and-activity booking links into the search giant's "Things to Do." When the front door belongs to someone else, sitting behind every door is a reasonable place to be.

03 / The productXplore, one system with three doors

In 2018 BeMyGuest shipped Xplore, a booking system built alongside operators to handle online, over-the-counter and B2B sales at once. It is modular by design - an operator takes only the pieces it needs rather than swallowing a monolith.

04 / The modelMarketplace margins and modular software

BeMyGuest makes money two ways. There's the marketplace itself - the spread between the net rates operators give and the rates agents pay - and there's the software, the Xplore modules that operators run their own sales on. The company has described a performance-driven, partner-growth posture rather than a pure upfront-licence pitch: grow with the operator, not just off them.

05 / The peopleA research analyst and a clean handoff

Founder Clement Wong did not arrive from a coding bootcamp. He came from the research side of travel, with stints at Travelport, Euromonitor International and the research team at Phocuswright Europe - the kind of background that lets you see a market's shape before it forms. He has said the company's progress leaned heavily on hiring the right in-house talent; outsourcing, in his telling, did not work as well.

In late 2018, after roughly seven years at the helm, Wong stepped down to spend more time with family and the startup community. The seat did not go to an outside hire. It went to Blanca Menchaca, who had joined in 2013 as co-founder and COO. A promotion from within, not a rescue from without - a rarer thing in startup land than it should be.

06 / The moneyModest capital, category lead

BeMyGuest's funding history is notable for its restraint. Its 2017 Series A of SG$11.5M was led by Raffles Venture Partners and technology investor Koh Boon Hwee, with participation from SPRING SEEDS Capital - the investment arm of a Singapore government agency - and travel agency Chan Brothers. A Series B followed in 2019, raised largely from existing stakeholders. Total capital sits around US$9.7M: small by the standards of travel unicorns, yet enough to build a category leader.

07 / The fieldWhere it sits in the market

The tours-and-activities space is crowded with names built for the consumer: GetYourGuide and Klook on the marketplace front, Viator under TripAdvisor, and booking-software players like Rezdy, TrekkSoft and Ventrata. BeMyGuest's slice is narrower and more defensible - it is deep in APAC's supply side, curating a catalog of Asian attractions and moving it through a distribution network rather than fighting for the traveller's first click. It became described, at one point, as the world's largest online booking platform for Asian activities.

What makes the company easy to underestimate is exactly what makes it durable. It picked a large, ugly, offline market; it chose infrastructure over glamour; and it grew on modest money while the flashier corners of travel burned through far more. A decade on, when a traveller in Asia buys a skip-the-line ticket without thinking about it, there's a fair chance the booking quietly passed through Singapore first.