Macau might be a small town to live in, but it has always been a great jumping off point for travelling to fantastic destinations around the region. And travelling has become a favourite pastime for local residents… that is until last year when international holidays suddenly became impossible. Things might gradually be getting better, but who really knows when we will be able to vacation again? So, in the meantime, one innovative local entrepreneur has come up with a clever way to see the world from the comfort of your own living room – a new app called Trally. Kylie Chim actually came up with the idea for Trally before the pandemic shut down global travel, and today in 2021, it seems to be a much more useful concept than ever.
“In 2018, I was working in Macau as a hotel general manager. This gave me the opportunity to speak with many guests and I realised that a lot of them wanted to explore other parts of the world but didn’t have the budget. Twitch was doing live streaming at the time, so I thought ‘what if we could do that for travelling?’” says Kylie, the founder and CEO of the company.
The basic concept of the app is that you can choose a city you want to explore, then choose a particular tour itinerary and a host, book the tour and then sit back and get shown around by your host, all from the comfort of home.
“You can connect with a local host who you can converse and interact with instantly, and you can even navigate the host as they are walking around, tell them to turn left, turn right, buy something, answer questions,” Kylie explains. “As a guest you can log in to Trally.com, choose the city, choose a variety of tours and see the cost, duration, language and itinerary.”
There are different costs and different levels of interaction and customization.
“You can just join a tour for free and interact through messages. Afterwards you can choose to tip your host as much as you like. Or for the paid one-on-one tour you can have an audio conversation with your host as they show you around.”
Kylie acknowledges that since the pandemic, other competitors have already started offering virtual experiences, for example, AirBnB Online Experience and Amazon Explore, but there are some key differences.
“They are mainly providing virtual tours for the North American and US markets, while we are focused on Asia,” notes Kylie. “Also, we have our own platform and our business model offers free tours and paid tours, whereas they use zoom and only have paid tours, and we will be launching our donation model very soon. So it’s a bit like with Uber, you can connect with a driver and say where you want to go exactly; our competitors don’t offer as much customization.”
Kylie has been developing Trally for the past two years and is currently in the trial phase of launching the app and recruiting local hosts. Having been born in Macau and lived between here and Singapore over the years, her home town seemed like the logical place to start the enterprise.
“I’m a member of the Macau Incubator Centre (MYEIC) and I have received a lot of support from them in terms of resources and connections. We have also pitched the idea to MGTO and received positive responses. And we received financial support from the Cultural Affairs Bureau,” she notes. “Macau is my birth place, so it’s the perfect place to start.”
“We will focus on tours from Macau first, and then roll out in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea,” she adds.
Over the past few months, her main aim has been to recruit hosts who can provide interesting and engaging tours around different parts of the world.
“At first we want to prioritize English speaking hosts, people who love to explore, walk around and talk with international guests. Right now we already have hosts from different parts of the world on our waiting list. The majority are currently from Macau because of our recent recruitment drive,” says Kylie.
Trally held their First International KOL Training in Macau recently, which mostly focused on Cantonese speaking individuals who want to be KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and it was met with a very positive response.
“We had over 100 applicants without doing any advertising. Due to the positive response, we are also planning to have another session in English and Mandarin in late June or early July. We will be screening and choosing hosts to provide training so we can ensure the quality of our tours.”
Hosts have the flexibility to design the itinerary, length of tour, time and date that they want. And they can choose how much they want to charge.
“For free tours, the hosts can just try to get tips and try to upsell to a more customized tour. Hosts can try to get more guests on each tour to earn more money and Trally gets a small cut. If people like the hosts they can give them reviews and tips which other users will be able to see. As a host, the better job you do, the more you will be recommended.”
Getting this project up and running in just two years has not been without its challenges, in particular financing and coordinating an international team during Covid.
“I bootstrapped, a start-up term meaning I used my own money. Later we received some investors and now some Cultural Bureau support,” explains Kylie. “The other challenge is management of a remote team. We have weekly meetings and bi-weekly, ‘Happy Trally’ sessions, just to meet up for fun and team building. Our app developer is from Pakistan, our designer is from Australia, we have a small team in Singapore and me in Macau and admin from Hong Kong.”
As the project is finally getting started, Kylie is excited about the future possibilities of Trally allowing people to see places they might not otherwise be able to. And there is a higher goal as well.
“The main vision is to promote global citizenship. Through the app, we hope that we can connect people and nationalities from all over the world to better understand different cultures.”
