According to their website, Lemi is…”designed to help travellers save and share discoveries around the world.”
In order to bring collaboration and sharing to the travel community, Lemi offers you the chance to post recommendations and inspire others to try amazing experiences. Most importantly, there is a message and drive to support local businesses that they’d only hear about by word of mouth.
We had the chance to speak to their founder and CEO, Cheryl Ng about Lemi and her take on the changing travel scene. As the pandemic continues to ravage the economy and people around the world, we learn how Cheryl wants to take back some of what was lost and give it back to the community by providing a platform that looks to find the ‘different’ and introduce people to whole new side of a place that they might not actually know.
Find out what else she had to share.
Tell us a bit more about Lemi and the story behind it.
I travel frequently, and one of my greatest joys is discovering new experiences through small, local businesses. They provide a unique cultural flavour and embody the true character of their environment. However, rapid globalisation is leading to a gradual homogenisation of culture. It is sad to see the same global brands and businesses dominating storefronts across the multiple countries that I’ve visited – especially when a destination becomes popular and large brands inadvertently muscle the small businesses out. Things get even worse when crises such as COVID-19 hit – the small businesses are the first to go because they are the most vulnerable.
When you travel, you are looking forward to experiencing something ‘different’. What would be the point of travelling if we still saw the same shops and brands everywhere? I have been blessed with unique, authentic experiences in my travels, and I think it is important to support local businesses to preserve the rich diversity of our world. That is why I wanted to create a technology-based solution that would benefit both sides of this ecosystem: travellers would have a convenient method of organising and sharing their local travel recommendations, while businesses would enjoy more exposure and hopefully, more revenue.
READ MORE: We spoke to Ellen Franke from The Ritz-Carlton, Langkawi about the travel industry and how she plans to find success in this pandemic
Since my team and I created Lemi in 2016, Lemi has evolved into a social sharing platform that encourages its community to go beyond their comfort zones to discover unique, authentic stories and experiences in new places. When users add a place, Lemi finds and stores location details to help them organise their recommendations into creative, easily shareable lists. If made public, these lists support small businesses by spotlighting them to other people. Users can also purchase Lemi digital coupons for themselves or others to use at businesses around the world.
Unlike other review-based platforms, Lemi doesn’t believe in star ratings and rankings. These are an overly simplistic summary of a person’s experience, are selectively provided and stifle creativity for businesses. Instead, Lemi focuses on positivity and helping people associate ‘different’ with ‘good’ by inspiring them to explore and highlight the unique aspects of a business. Whether these places serve a famous recipe that hasn’t changed in a century, or were converted from a site with historical value, every place has a charm all their own. Good things like that should be shared, and that is what Lemi encourages its community to do.
How do you foresee the future of the hospitality industry post-COVID-19?
I foresee that travel will become more expensive due to increased hygiene standards and fewer passenger numbers filling up plane seats. Travellers will also opt for shorter but higher quality trips, during which they are likely to avoid crowded tourist hotspots and favour local, less popular destinations.
Lemi has a more holistic view of travel, and our data includes both leisure and business travellers because many business travelers use Lemi to plan their trips overseas. Business travel will still be significant because many Asian businesses have cross-border relationships that require building trust and goodwill; this is not something that video conferencing can easily replace.
However, given the general caution and fear over safety, business travel may remain slow for the time being as both parties must want to meet for a work trip to be organised. Therefore, leisure travel may actually be the first to return, beginning with the domestic front as it is more affordable, convenient, environmentally-friendly and safe.
COVID-19 has made more people hyper-aware of the importance of good hygiene, helped along in part by public efforts to educate citizens on proper hygiene protocols and transmission risks. This increased awareness will result in heightened standards and expectations for hygiene from the general public. Therefore, the biggest hurdle for the hospitality industry will be maintaining good hygiene levels and reassuring customers of their ability to provide a safe, sanitised environment – especially for F&B outlets and accommodation.
Do you believe ‘revenge travel’ will be the saviour of the travel industry or just another false hope (or worse, a potential disaster causing overcrowding and resurgence of the pandemic)?
We have seen some cases abroad where the fear of missing out, overenthusiasm and underestimating the need to follow protocol resulted in a resurgence of COVID-19. In the worst situations, these even led to lockdowns being reinstated. I believe that these can serve as cautionary tales for people to proceed with caution and take social distancing seriously. As with any activity, travel is possible now and even encouraged to help stimulate the local economy – as long as people are responsible. We shouldn’t need the government and local authorities to impose fines and other deterrents for us to keep ourselves safe.
If managed correctly, ‘revenge travel’ can provide a much-needed boost to the travel industry and the national economy at large. However, until a working vaccine is found – and even for some time after that – the general desire to travel will war with fear over personal safety. Since domestic travel is safer and more accessible than international travel at the moment, this represents an excellent opportunity for domestic travel players to attract this ‘captive’ market. At Lemi, we want to enable people to direct their ‘revenge travel’ ambitions locally through our platform and community, which focus on sharing unique experiences.
Lemi believes that travel is a mindset, and you can do it anywhere. As the concepts of mindfulness and awareness become more mainstream, people understand that the physical act of travelling and changing your environment drastically simply makes it easier for you to be fully present and engaged with the world around you. But you are fully capable of doing so without travelling internationally. That’s why Lemi is all about experiencing your city in a different way. Exploring restaurants, coffee shops and favourite stores within our own countries will serve as a stepping stone towards supporting the recovery of these businesses, and by extension the economy.
The small businesses associated with travel and tourism have been hit the hardest. What can or is being done to help them recover?
Support for small businesses was already a trend before COVID-19; you could see that every day when people would choose small coffee shops instead of the larger franchises when given a choice. Small businesses bring personality and character to an otherwise monotonous cityscape.
During COVID-19, people have been willing to open up their wallets to support their favourite small businesses, purchasing credit to use at a later time via coupons or gift cards. In fact, we’ve just launched a digital coupon service on our Lemi app that allows our users to purchase coupons for businesses around the world. They can buy the coupons for themselves or send them as gifts via the Lemi chat to other users in the same area as those businesses. This way, they can support businesses by helping them receive immediate cash flow.
Many small businesses are realising the value of digitalisation in helping them reach their customers and generate revenue, especially now with travel still limited. There are many initiatives and programmes to help businesses digitalise to adapt to the pandemic. At Lemi, we reach out to businesses and encourage them to claim their business profile on our app. Once they do, users will be able to talk to them via chat and they can claim any revenue from coupons purchased for their business. This digital platform is completely free – we do not charge for setup and only earn revenue on a commission basis as we are sincere in helping them succeed. Any profits earned are reinvested into supporting more local businesses.
Independent businesses give neighbourhoods soul. I believe that post COVID-19, people will better understand the value of these small businesses and choose to patron them even more. We are always ready to help people discover these hidden gems and authentic experiences through our users’ lists on Lemi.
What is next for Lemi in the future?
Our community is central to Lemi and we take their feedback seriously as we strive to grow and improve. Open conversations between us and our users enable us to deliver a better product that provides a fantastic experience. Since we launched our digital coupon service recently, our short-term focus will be to reach out to more businesses to help our users support them through these coupon purchases.
I think that more people will be open to discovering different, off-the-beaten-track experiences in post-pandemic travel to avoid overcrowding and overpricing. This, combined with the resurgence of domestic travel, presents an excellent opportunity for Lemi users to contribute to the industry’s revival with their user-created travel content and curated lists on the Lemi app. We have seen a surge in content readership and app activity since the pandemic began, so we know the demand is there and people are just waiting for the situation to stabilise. We are using this downtime to improve the app performance and add new features in preparation for travel to resume.
Ultimately, we believe that travel is a mindset. Our goal is to nurture a community that is enthusiastic about celebrating differences, travelling responsibly and supporting local businesses, whether in their own backyards or beyond. So far, our users are present in 744 cities in 96 countries, and they share self-created travel content that reaches 130 countries. We are constantly looking to expand our reach to more countries as we want to connect unique experiences and enthusiastic travellers anywhere in the world.
We are on the lookout for insight from the leading travel experts from around the world to give our readers a better understanding of what the world will look like post COVID-19.
If you are a travel expert or know someone that is, please drop us an email.
