1. Tell us your story. How did Curated Planet get started?

We provide a communications platform for tour operators that reaches travelers wherever they are. We keep travelers happy, on time, and connected with their guides and office staff.

We started our journey by focusing on the in-app immersive digital itinerary, but realized that on-trip communications are broken, especially for large groups.

2. What makes Curated Planet different from your competitors?

It is standard practice to create a WhatsApp group. However, this requires: (1) everyone installing WhatsApp and joining the group; (2) everyone monitoring the WhatsApp group chat and enabling notifications; (3) the guide sharing his personal phone number with the entire group; (4) risking inappropriate exchanges of messages amongst group members.

We provide an easy way for guides to type a message and reach the entire group or a single traveler – guaranteed. Plus… optional group chat that can be monitored.

3. What is your favourite success story from your organisation?

We reduce latecomers by 90%!

4. What can we expect to see from Curated Planet in the future?

Sentiment analysis, so that the office staff are immediately alerted to any issues.

5. Which trends do you see in educational and active youth travel?

I’m going to give a shoutout here to GroupCollect; they’re laser-focused on solving the pain points of payment collection for student tours, and I think they’re doing a great job. It was previously done by in-house ad-hoc systems and they have streamlined this process.

6. How do you work to ensure the health and safety of young travellers involved with Curated Planet?

We are a communications and location-sharing platform. We keep young travelers on time and in sync with their guides via guaranteed communication and location sharing between travelers and their guides.

7. What was your motivation to join WYSE Travel Confederation?

To connect with student tour operators and tell them about our communications and location-sharing platform.

8. Have you attended a WYSE Travel Confederation event? (WYSTC, STAY WYSE, WYSE Exchange Australia, WETM-IAC) If so, what was your experience with the event?

Yes; WYSTC. I was very impressed with the 20-minute meeting slots and matchmaking technology that encouraged everyone to be on time to their designated appointments.

9. What is an industry challenge your organisation is facing currently?

Lack of centralized reservation technology (“restech”) systems for the tour operators. This is why I gave a shoutout to GroupCollect above. We connect into the restech systems to automatically create manifests that can then be used for seamless communications. It’s possible for tour operators to integrate with us directly, but that involves at least one engineer from their team.