What is MOGU's objective?

The objective of MOGU as a product is to provide retail and wholesale travel agencies with a two-way communication channel with customers in the form of a mobile application, in order to monitor activity at destination, offer personalised recommendations to travellers and ultimately make optimal business decisions based on aggregated, structured and analysed data.

MOGU solves three major problems that characterise the travel agency sector:

• Lack of knowledge about the traveller: what are his preferences, interests, how he feels, where he is, what he needs. These are questions that an agency is unable to answer with current systems. This has two negative effects: directly on sales, since offering generalist products or recommendations based on variables such as popularity does not convert as well as predicting the most optimal activity given the traveller's profile. And in turn, it has an indirect negative effect on customer retention and loyalty. 

• Decentralised communication: today, 74% of agencies use Whatsapp to communicate with their travellers, a channel that, at first glance, may sound decisive, but in practice has serious limitations. To highlight the most relevant ones, it is not a way to make payments, schedule the sending of communications or send rating surveys in an agile and segmented way. To illustrate this as clearly as possible, let's look at a real example:

A tour operator (TTOO) prepares a 20-day tour of Europe and distributes it through wholesalers who in turn rely on retail agencies. It is finally booked by 40 people. The guide, who reports to the TTOO, has a PDF that specifies the information of each traveller and a Whatsapp group to share the information, in which there are 32 people because the rest have preferred not to be there for privacy reasons. The journey begins. The guide, in a type of trip like this, must sell as many activities at the destination as possible and usually does so through a POS, charging one by one. As he collects the money, he records it on a notepad. A few hours before, he shares the information about the activities (time and meeting point) on the Whatsapp group. However, his message gets lost in the flood of messages that follow: one shares a photo, another asks if anyone has seen his son's cap on the bus, another enquires about vegan menu options, and so on. When the time comes, the guide is forced to resend the information. I could also have used a mailing list, but as a general communication mechanism in group travel, it becomes a very inefficient process.

• Difficulty in digitising in-house: 90% of agencies have 7-8 employees; scarce human and financial resources to lead their own digital transformation. They need third parties that are committed to the sector and provide them with technology that does not require costly customised developments. This democratisation of technology, mainly based on SaaS models, has been seen in multiple relevant sectors in a country such as fintech, healthcare, edtech and now it needs to fully reach the traditional tourism of travel agencies.

In this sense, MOGU consists of a mobile application for the agent-traveller relationship and a platform from which the agency monitors the trip in real time. The application fulfils two functions: on the one hand, it serves as a direct channel to centralise all the communications that take place on a trip (notifications, meeting points, practical information, messages from the guide, evaluation surveys) and on the other hand, it allows the agency to monetise the traveller at the destination, as the traveller can pay for activities from their mobile phone that MOGU automatically recommends in a personalised way.

The process is very simple: once the traveller makes the booking (through whatever channels; MOGU does not intervene here), the agency shares the code identifying the trip with the traveller to insert it into the application. From then on, both parties are connected.

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