About Thrillark

With over 185k guests served, Thrillark is a managed marketplace that curates experiences for travelers. From tours, activities, and experiences in a city, Thrillark offers a niche segment to users that helps them purchase these experiences seamlessly with the least amount of effort.

Today, 25% of bookings for tours are made online, and this industry is not as digital as flights and hotels. This is why Thrillark’s vision is to bring the world’s best in-person experiences on a platform for everyone and book it most conveniently. Situated in the UAE, the platform is soon moving to countries like Istanbul, Marrakesh, Cairo, and a few others located within the MENA region.

Let us give you an instance

At the Burj khalifa, one waits in line for anywhere between 10-30 minutes to take the lift to the viewing deck. But Thrillark makes it happen in under 30 seconds. That is their USP. Giving skip-the-line experiences to customers in the most convenient way is what they offer.

Another instance

Say you google ‘city tours’ for a destination you want to visit, and you get a wide variety of results. All the listings show competitive prices, activities, events, features, and inclusions, which leaves you confused. So, as a customer, how do you choose? This is where Thrillark takes it to the next level, giving them an edge over their competitors. They curate experiences based on what the user is looking for – each more unique than the other.

As mentioned above, 25% of tours and activities are booked online, and 75% of them are booked offline. Most marketplaces follow the traditional method of securing these tours and activities – they get third-party vendors on board and let them curate a standard package for everyone, which makes the marketplace messy and chaotic. Furthermore, the retention window for a user is not long. Assume they take a trip for a week, and they will look at having 3-5 experiences in that time, which is the only time to be able to target the user for repeat purchases and transactions.

Thrillark doesn’t call itself a tourism business; they consider themselves a part of the entertainment industry since the experiences they sell to their end users are holistic and beyond just flights and hotels. They have over 35K users daily and have served over 185K guests worldwide. Thrillark is a comprehensive platform wherein people from both the arrival and the departing destination use the platform to book experiences.

Objectives

• Boosting the engagement rate
• Bringing organic traffic onto the platform, since earlier focus was only on paid channels
• Reducing the drop in transactions, as well as overall user drop-offs
• Re-targeting people who’ve purchased experiences before and engaging with them accordingly

Challenges

• Lack of email automation – the process was manual and tiresome
• Increasing engagement and conversion rates
• Lack of a data model based on such a niche industry
• Very little organic growth due to more focus on user acquisition than user retention

Solution

Needless to say, when COVID-19 hit, the travel industry bore the brunt of it. Businesses shut, there were losses galore, and people struggled to do the bare minimum, along with the significant loss of life.

Even in the case of Thrillark, there were obstacles to how the business functioned. Consequently, WebEngage devised a comprehensive, holistic plan to bring Thrillark’s business back to normalcy and take it to new heights. WebEngage gave a lot of flexibility to Thrillark in terms of how their business was managed and the different approaches that could be used. The company couldn’t base its functions on a traditional e-commerce model since the niche is different compared to flights and hotel dealerships, so making a comprehensive data model became a challenge that WebEngage helped solve with its easy integration.

To know more about the steps taken by WebEngage, download the Impact Story now.

Impact/Metrics

• 60% increase in user engagement through email campaigns since inception.
• 15% increase in repeat purchases of the travelers using personalized recommendations.
• 10% of Cart abandoners retained and completed booking an experience.