What's your 'real' trip?

My Real Trip’s co-founder Lee Dong-gun, back row left, poses with staff members at the company’s office in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province. / Korea Times photo by Yun Suh-young

My Real Trip offers customized, guided trips for travelers

By Yun Suh-young

Lee Dong-gun remembers what it was like to plan a vacation, but then have the experience ruined by impersonal travel agents and guides who ushered travelers around like cattle.

For Lee — now the CEO of a budding online travel agency — the final straw came when he joined a tour to Seocheon, South Chungcheong Province, which advertised the chance to pick strawberries to take home.

To his dismay, he was forced to buy strawberries when the group arrived at the farm. Not only that, the group was given no dining options and whisked instead into a bland restaurant selected by the guide.

The experience got Lee dreaming about creating a more personalized travel experience. In 2012, he launched My Real Trip, which prides itself on offering a more personal experience by employing guides who have intimate knowledge of the travel destination.

“Starting a business like this doesn’t necessarily require a person to have traveled a lot. It just takes one really horrible experience to get you thinking,” Lee said.

The agency is seeing a boom of interest after it won the first episode of “Golden Pentagon” an audition program for local start-ups, last October.

The company didn’t become the final winner of the show, but it’s still reaping benefits: traffic on its website jumped 30 times and registration for tours jumped three fold. Lee expects the numbers to continue climbing through the summer travel season.

Unlike the typical package tours offered by major travel agencies here, My Real Trip provides “niche tours” guided by Koreans who are local residents in the foreign country. The guides plan, organize, price and distribute their programs through My Real Trip and the online travel agent connects them directly with consumers.

For instance, one Italy-based guide offers an 11-hour winery tour in the Toscana region; and in Paris, a Parisienne university student guides travelers on a “Midnight in Paris” tour introducing the places where the Woody Allen film was shot. In New York, a designer who moonlights as a guide introduces the city’s artistic alleys, and a New Yorker foodie takes travelers on a downtown dessert tour.

The programs are created by the guides themselves and reflect their passions.

“A big change in the travel industry is that guides are gaining their own reputations. Our most popular guides include ‘Red bus 88’ in London and ‘Uno’ in Rome. These guides are a brand of their own,” said Lee.

“Most of the package tours introduce the guides when you arrive at the airport, but we state who they are from the beginning, allowing customers to choose their own guides.”

My Real Trip says it selects guides through a rigorous process that includes Skype interviews, identity confirmation, and on-site evaluations.

“We have both amateur guides and professional guides. Amateur guides have really creative content. They come up with unique themes and interesting tour routes. The professional guides have a stronger leverage on general tours. They know where ordinary travelers want to visit.”

Niche tours

The system allows travelers to design their own tour focused on a specific theme or place. Schedules are flexible to change as the guides and travelers adjust their tour schedules together.

“People are now more focusing on ‘what’ they can do at a travel destination rather than ‘where’ they are going. Major travel agencies simply focus on how many people they can send abroad rather than what people can actually do there,” Lee said.

“We started paying attention to what people wanted. ‘What to eat’ and ‘what to do’ were becoming more important than ‘where to go.’ It’s no longer exciting to tell friends that you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower. Instead, people want to tell friends something unique they’ve experienced. So we focus entirely on the content and that comes from the guides. We now have 360 tour programs, which is more than what Korea’s biggest travel agency has.”

The service has some 330 guides operating in 165 cities in 38 countries. The website contains over 600 reviews written about the guides which, Lee says, are among the most crucial factors in maintaining My Real Trip’s reputation.

“Reviews are crucial for us in controlling our quality and for travelers in verifying the quality of our products,” said Lee.

Users

The main customers of My Real Trip are those between the 30 to 50 age groups who don’t want to join the package groups but don’t want to go through the hassle of planning their own trips.

“When we started out, we targeted those in their 20s to get a unique experience. But our targeting was wrong. It turned out our main customers were those between their 30s and 50s who wanted comfortable and reliable tours. We realized this in January last year and changed our strategy,” Lee said.

Lee decided to apply for “Golden Pentagon” in order to reach out to the demographic.

“We thought it would be an effective medium to promote our service. We didn’t care about winning,” he said.

The service is popular among families who don’t want to join package tours or couples who need someone else to take pictures for them. The “snap shot tour,” on which a professional photographer takes pictures while guiding, is quite popular among couples and newly-weds.

Global service

The tours are currently available in Korean only but the company plans to expand the service to Chinese and English.

“The reason why people use our service is to be free from the stress of language barriers. Our Korean customers say they don’t want to listen to foreign language explanations when they travel abroad and be stressed out trying to comprehend,” said Lee.

“Just like we provide Korean guides to Korean travelers, we’re planning to open services for Chinese travelers who want Chinese guides when they come to Korea. Our upcoming services will be inbound services whereas until now, we focused on outbound.”

The Chinese guide service will start as early as the second half of this year. It will be provided by Chinese residents in Korea who can speak Korean or Koreans who can speak Chinese well. An English service is also in the works.

Enterprising spirit

In addition to underwhelming travel experiences, Lee is also driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, which he developed as an exchange student in Germany.

“I was surprised how foreign students were dream-driven. They stimulated me to start a business at a young age, telling me it would take at least 20 years to become a professional in one field. So when I came back to Seoul, I immediately started this company.” Lee established the company with Baek Min-seo, his university alumna.

Lee is excited about the future.

“I want to become a serial entrepreneur who continues to start a business. I enjoy doing business so I want to continue working as a start-up entrepreneur until I’m in my 60s.”