How one traveltech startup grew sevenfold since the pandemic started

If there’s one industry that Covid-19 hit hard, it’s the travel, tourism, and hospitality sector. In 2018, Singapore generated S$34 billion (US$25 billion) in tourism-related spending. Now, the government is looking to capture just 10% of that amount from domestic tourism.

Even as the city-state throws everything including the kitchen sink to revive its travel sector, one traveltech startup has defied the odds and somehow managed to grow sevenfold since the pandemic began.

That startup is Vouch, a chatbot builder turned digital concierge service for hotels. The firm finally found its product-market fit in the midst of the pandemic – a mixture of ripe conditions, good decisions, and luck gave the company wings.

The Andaz Singapore hotel is one of Vouch’s clients / Photo credit: Andaz

“Now, a product like ours is a lot more relevant to the industry,” Vouch co-founder and CEO Joseph Ling told Tech in Asia. “It’s contactless, it’s infrastructure-light. Hotels don’t have to buy any hardware, and it works on guests’ phones.”

That being said, the story isn’t the same for all chatbot builders and digital concierge startups out there. When asked what Vouch’s competitors have been up to while the company grabbed market share, all Ling said was, “I don’t know where they went.”

How the stars aligned

Vouch, like many startups, started off doing something entirely different.

The Singapore-based company pivoted from doing targeted marketing to building chatbots, and then again sharpened its focus to offering digital concierge services in 2018. But even with a few success stories validating the business, Vouch “wasn’t doing incredibly well” before the pandemic, its CEO says.

“We were still trying to find our product-market fit,” Ling notes. But after Covid-19, with the urgency for hotels to take on more innovative solutions, the company could close a deal with an entire hotel group within two weeks, claims the co-founder.

Vouch went from having a single-digit market share in January 2020 to capturing 20% of hotels in Singapore in the span of a few months, Ling claims. Its clientele is made up mostly of upscale and luxury hotels.

Now, the startup has 15,000 hotel rooms under its belt, with 80% of revenue coming from Singapore and the rest coming from different markets, including Korea, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Europe.

Image credit: Vouch

In 2020 alone, Vouch set up an office in Korea and added 17 new members to the team. The company now has offices in Singapore, Indonesia, and Korea and 29 employees across these three countries.

Riding the “perfect storm”

Hitting the ceiling in Singapore