UOB brings The Travel Insider marketplace to Malaysia with content at its core

United Overseas Bank (UOB) Malaysia is launching The Travel Insider, the first online travel marketplace designed by the bank to make it easier for customers to search, to plan and to book their holidays. First launched in Singapore in 2018, The Travel Insider is the result of a collaboration between United Overseas Bank (UOB) and more than 500 leading companies from the airline, hospitality and travel industries to create an online destination where visitors can easily search, plan and book their holidays, featuring competitive range of flight, accommodation and tour deals.

According to UOB, travellers are known to spend hours trawling through online and offline resources just to create their itinerary and compare prices. As such, UOB gathered top insider tips, curated content to create travel guides and proposed itineraries and worked with its partners to ensure that competitive and extensive deals can be found easily in one location.

In building The Travel Insider, UOB also shortlisted top 24 travel destinations based on UOB card spend and data aggregated based on insights supplied by its partners, Agoda, Booking.com, Expedia and Singapore Airlines. The Travel Insider taps the application programming interfaces (APIs) of Agoda, Expedia, Booking.com and Singapore Airlines to draw the best options from more than a million hotel and flight possibilities.

In recognising the increasing trend for travellers to seek genuine experiences over standard sightseeing holidays, UOB Malaysia has also tapped the local knowledge of 29 insiders who live in the most popular destination cities. These travel aficionados provide personal insights into the most appealing and satisfying experiences in their hometowns. Their tips can be added to the proposed itineraries. The insiders, who are professionals drawn from fields such as architecture, engineering, landscape and teaching, have more than 1 million followers on social media.

The online marketplace also has a planning tool that makes it easy for the traveller to create and to save their own itinerary and then to share it with travel buddies who in turn can give comments and suggest their own preferences for the holiday.

Ronnie Lim, managing director and country head of personal financial services, UOB Malaysia, said, “Travel is a high priority among our customers, with one in five UOB Malaysia debit and credit cardmembers travelling abroad at least once in 2019. We have also seen a shift in the way our customers plan and book their travels, with 81% of their travel-related spend last year taking place online, a 34% increase from the previous year."