Blanca Menchaca once treated Norway as a long-weekend destination. In 2012, while living in Singapore and working at Wego, she regarded a 30-hour flight as a perfectly manageable proposition. Most people would spend part of that weekend recovering from the idea. For Menchaca, the journey belonged to a life already spread across continents: born in Mexico, educated in Australia, working in Asia.
Her working life has been just as international, though its demands are more particular. Menchaca has spent years asking what happens when a travel business crosses a border and assumes its customers, suppliers and habits will look familiar. A flight connects two places. A business still has to learn what happens at either end.
Today she is co-founder and CEO of BeMyGuest, the Singapore travel technology company that connects tours, attractions and other experiences with sellers, and provides booking software to operators. Her career runs through marketing, operations and ownership. The recurring question is how to make a broad ambition function in individual markets, where the details have a habit of refusing to behave.
01The audience had other ideas
Before BeMyGuest, there was an Australian startup incubator within Enero Group, then known as Photon. Menchaca held senior positions there in 2007. In 2010 she joined Wego in Singapore, moving into the world of flight and hotel metasearch. The business helped travellers compare options; her work concerned how those travellers would find it and return.
At a marketing panel in Singapore in 2011, she gave advice with little patience for geographical shortcuts. Southeast Asia required attention to cultural and religious differences. Australian audiences, she explained, responded to humour and local messaging. Reusing material made for American or British customers was insufficient. The region could appear as a single territory on a presentation slide. The audience had other ideas.
“You need to know your audience.”
Blanca Menchaca · 2011
Wego maintained local Facebook pages for markets including Australia, India and Indonesia. Menchaca warned that opening a local page meant accepting the work of looking after it. Community management required support, not simply a translated name and an optimistic launch. She also argued against overwhelming followers with posts. Restraint, in this setting, had a commercial purpose.
By 2012 she was discussing the expansion of Wego’s marketing team across Singapore, Indonesia and India, alongside its growing international recognition. She cared about measuring performance, while acknowledging that everything could not realistically be measured. The combination is revealing: a marketer prepared to use numbers, and prepared to stop them from pretending to explain the whole room.
02An invitation to the supplier’s side
Clement Wong founded BeMyGuest in 2012. Menchaca joined him in 2013 as a partner and co-founder. An announcement about S$500,000 in angel funding introduced her as chief marketing officer, arriving from Wego’s global online marketing leadership. She was moving from helping people find flights and hotels to helping them find something worth doing once they arrived.
The early catalogue had a pleasing disregard for the ordinary. In describing it, Menchaca listed fighter-jet flights with a former German air-force pilot, hot-air-balloon rides, henna classes, kayaking and K-pop lessons. It was an assortment that could make a hotel breakfast seem a little underambitious. But a memorable experience still needed a way to be discovered, priced and booked.
The team drew on different parts of travel. Wong brought strategy and market research experience. Early colleagues included finance executive Sandra Ho, previously at Wego, computer scientist Holger Jehle and content specialist Olalla Rey, whose background included Expedia. Menchaca’s marketing experience sat within a business that also needed money management, software and product information. An appealing activity description could only do part of the job.
By August 2015, BeMyGuest offered more than 10,000 activities across 600 destinations. Those are historical catalogue figures, a snapshot of the company at that moment. In discussing its position, Menchaca concentrated on the Asian supply and Asian travellers it served. Scale mattered, but the character of the inventory mattered too.
03Six hundred destinations, many more differences
Menchaca resisted easy comparisons with Viator or GetYourGuide. Asia contained different languages, cultures and travel behaviours, while its activity operators were often small or medium-sized businesses. A strategy that worked in one country could encounter a different set of expectations in the next. Her argument was practical: regional reach required local understanding.
She described technology and distribution as BeMyGuest’s contribution, with operators providing the activities. The ambition was to become an extension of a supplier’s business. Consider the distinction that implies. A company selling software can concentrate on the installation. A company trying to extend a supplier’s business has to care about whether bookings actually follow.
By 2018 her operating responsibilities encompassed a multicultural organisation with teams across Singapore, the Philippines, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia, with expansion towards India. Her earlier Wego experience had also involved building teams across different markets. The geography of her career had become the geography of her management work.
There was a slower side to her relationship with Singapore. In 2015 she named Chinese tea appreciation and visits to local religious sites among her favourite activities. The tea detail is especially welcome in the biography of a technology operator: an experience organised around taking time. Her enthusiasm for travel extended to the small rituals inside a destination, as well as the long flight required to reach one.
Australia
Singapore
Partner & co-founder
Chief executive
04The booking button meets the ticket counter
In 2018 BeMyGuest launched Xplore, a booking system designed for the region’s activity suppliers. Its software covered e-commerce, payments in multiple Asian currencies, promotions and distribution to business customers. The product reflected the same problem Menchaca had described in marketing: an imported solution could overlook the conditions of a particular market.
At the time, she stressed the importance of real-time and same-day bookings, especially where mobile booking and payment behaviour prevailed. For an operator, that changes what availability means. A place on a tour might exist, but if a customer cannot reserve it when making a decision, its existence does little to help the sale.
The current Xplore offering covers an operator’s website, ticket counter and other direct channels. BeMyGuest’s distribution network connects operators to travel businesses that buy through an API or a web marketplace. These are different routes through the same commercial problem: the experience has to remain bookable wherever the customer or agent encounters it.
On 28 November 2018, Menchaca became CEO, succeeding Wong after serving as COO. She had completed executive education at INSEAD in 2017. The appointment put an existing partner and operator in charge of the company’s next stage. Her public remarks emphasised confidence in the team and in the adoption of its technology. The work she had been managing now came with responsibility for the whole business.
05More doors into the same experience
In August 2021, BeMyGuest announced an integration enabling free ticket booking links on Google Search. Through Xplore, the route led to an operator’s own website, with transactions processed through the system and proceeds sent to the operator’s preferred payment gateway. Search visibility and the practical business of receiving a booking were being joined together.
Menchaca framed that development around giving operators more sales channels. Later that year, in a video conversation with Jill Menze, she discussed the Google integration, a web-based point-of-sale system and the prospects for branded tours and super apps. The subjects ranged from the search screen to the offline counter. Her remit required attention to both.
Her conference appearances show that these questions have remained part of her public work. At Arival in San Diego in February 2022, she joined a Google debate alongside Viator founder Rod Cuthbert. In Bangkok in June 2023, she appeared in a session on managing relationships with online travel agencies. These were discussions about where operators fit within the systems selling their experiences.
At WiT Seoul in November 2024, she was scheduled to interview James Lee, Klook’s South Korea general manager, about the company’s local growth and strategy. In June 2026, Arival’s Brisbane programme listed her on a panel examining the future of experiences through APAC and Oceania. The countries and platforms change; the relationship between local practice and wider distribution keeps returning.
06The map keeps acquiring new destinations
BeMyGuest added Candy Chiun as chief commercial officer in April 2024. Chiun’s experience included senior roles at Headout and Klook and work with startup airline teams. Menchaca welcomed her to help guide commercial initiatives and services for clients worldwide. Growth, in this instance, began with another person joining the management team.
The outward movement became concrete again in September 2026. BeMyGuest announced a letter of intent with Melco Resorts & Entertainment following an August ceremony in Singapore, building on an existing distribution relationship involving Melco’s Macao attractions. Later that month, it announced a memorandum of understanding with Miral Destinations to promote Yas Island, Saadiyat Island and Abu Dhabi experiences across Southeast and Northeast Asia.
The Miral programme included promotional campaigns, destination sales calls, industry workshops and familiarisation trips. These are recognisable forms of travel-industry work, involving people learning products and building relationships. Even when the booking travels through software, somebody still has to understand the destination and the customer. Menchaca’s early insistence on knowing an audience has a long afterlife.
Her own travel continues too. Her WiT biography describes a digital nomad life adopted in 2021 with her husband and business partner, BeMyGuest CFO Ola Andersen. Their time includes Singapore, Dubai, Malaysia and Australia, with family visits in Norway and Mexico. The weekend journey of her Wego years fits within a longer pattern of living across borders.
An itinerary can make all those places look tidy. Running a business across them requires greater care. Menchaca’s story is full of the work that sits between the destination name and the confirmed booking: local teams, suitable messages, available inventory, payment and distribution. She has kept moving, while her business has kept returning to the details. There is plenty of room on the map. The interesting part is what happens when you get there.
