KKday with
Google Workspace
Founded in 2014, KKday is an ecommerce travel platform offering more than 300,000 authentic tours and travel activities in 92 countries. Headquartered in Taiwan, the company has expanded its office locations to 12 key markets, and has brought unique travel experiences to millions of travelers.
About KKday
Overview
To many people, traveling means more than just sightseeing. As independent travel becomes increasingly popular, more and more travelers want to go off the beaten path to fully immerse themselves in local culture, visit hidden gems, or enjoy eye-opening experiences.
KKday is dedicated to creating unforgettable journeys for independent travelers, by offering more than 300,000 tours and travel activities in 92 countries on its e-commerce platform. Founded in 2014, the Taiwanese company partners with travel package providers around the world to design unique travel experiences, ranging from ice fishing tours in Alaska, to market tours with local chefs in Korea, and even a samurai experience tour in Japan.
“The mission of KKday is to bring our customers the most original travel experiences and help them make the most of their trips in an easy way,” says Onnie Fong, CIO at KKday. “That is why we work closely with local tour providers in different countries, to continuously improve the experiences that we offer and broaden our tour selection.”
Fong notes that communication is crucial to the success of KKday’s business. As the company has partners around the world and 12 office locations across Asia-Pacific, 90% of its internal and external communication relies on emails. The company needed reliable and easy-to-use online collaboration tools to support its daily operations. Before KKday was officially founded, the founding team used an email system deployed on its own email server, but it required substantial resources to manage the server, and the performance was not ideal. To avoid the hassle, KKday decided to deploy Google Workspace as its business collaboration platform from day one, because it offers a fully managed email service and supports easy file sharing.
“Our IT resources were limited, so we were looking for fully managed collaboration tools that deliver high performance, without requiring a lot of operational effort,” explains Fong. “Google Workspace perfectly meets our needs by offering a full set of well-integrated and intuitive collaboration and productivity apps.”
Supporting efficient communication while reducing operational costs
KKday has been using Google Workspace since 2014. As its business grows, the company sometimes requires technical support to overcome specific challenges and achieve more cost-effective use. Master Concept, a multinational cloud technology advisor and Google Cloud partner, has been giving KKday timely advice along the way. For example, when KKday needed to merge the Google Workspace accounts of a company that it had acquired with its own, Master Concept suggested using a third-party tool to accelerate the integration process. The cloud advisor has also helped KKday apply for a mixed subscription plan of Google Workspace, which is only possible through Google Cloud partners. This results in savings on operational costs, as KKday is able to upgrade the subscription plan for only the employees in need, instead of all staff.
The KKday team also relies on Gmail as its main communication tool and stores all its files on Google Drive, which supports easy file sharing through email attachments or URL links. Before adopting Gmail, KKday used to receive a large volume of spam, and have its emails undelivered once or twice a week. When an email was missing or undelivered, the KKday team needed to check with its partners to see whose email server ran into an error, which was time-consuming and disrupted daily operations. Since Gmail filters out most junk mail and ensures successful delivery, KKday now receives 50% less spam and is confident that its email system is not the cause of errors when a missing email event happens.
With Gmail and Google Drive, KKday also no longer needs several dedicated engineers to manage its own mail and file servers. Because Google Workspace tools come with detailed log records, KKday’s IT team is able to easily track the changes of emails and files, and resolve frequently encountered issues in less than 10 minutes. Now, it only requires one engineer spending half of his work time to manage KKday’s email and file storage system that’s used by more than 700 employees.
“The performance of Gmail is way better than our previous email system supported by our own server. We don’t have to worry about mail delivery errors any more, and the hardware and labor costs required have been greatly reduced,” shares Fong.
Swift implementation of a hybrid work model across 12 office locations
KKday has been using Google Meet for years to conduct online meetings, which are scheduled through Google Calendar, across its 12 office locations in different countries. The live broadcast feature of Google Meet has also enabled KKday to effortlessly hold its biannual town hall meetings virtually for hundreds of employees. As a result, when the COVID-19 lockdown measure required employees to work from home between 2020 and 2022, the KKday staff were able to quickly adapt to remote collaboration and remain highly productive.
After seeing the success of remote work, KKday decided to make the hybrid work model permanent to enhance the company’s agility, and give its employees greater autonomy. Fong says that the hybrid work model also fits KKday’s company values, which includes the motto “work hard, play hard.” “Together with Gmail and Google Drive, Google Meet and Google Calendar allow our employees to work wherever they want, and empower them with more freedom, which aligns with our company culture as an independent traveler enabler. Most of the time, I don’t even know in which countries my colleagues are working from,” Fong adds, laughing.
As a tourism company, KKday holds a huge amount of personal data of its customers, and therefore sees information security as one of its top priorities. It uses Classroom to provide its employees with related training, so that all its courses are organized in one place, and learning records are easily tracked. With Google Drive, the KKday team can easily limit access to files to relevant teams, which prevents data leaks. When a personnel is about to leave the company, all files that they own can be swiftly transferred to another employee, so that no file is lost due to staff changes.
Furthermore, KKday employs Google Account as the login authentication method for more than 70 internal systems. With the secure login mechanism supported by Google, KKday is able to ensure the security of its systems without creating a separate identity verification process. The security standards guaranteed by Google also means that KKday is in compliance with information security regulations across all countries. “By providing Google accounts, Google Workspace has greatly raised the information security level of our business. We can rest assured that our systems comply with the regulations in different countries, and we are always ready for audits,” notes Fong.
Enabling global business expansion plans
As COVID-19 travel restrictions continue being lifted in many countries, KKday has seen its business grow rapidly, and expects the number of its employees to reach 1,000 by 2023. With fully managed and intuitive Google Workspace tools, KKday can effortlessly support team expansion without adding extra management or training resources. To facilitate its new businesses that require external partners, such as drivers, to access its internal systems, the company plans to leverage the Google account login method for greater security and management simplicity.
Fong says, “For more than eight years, Google Workspace has not only served as the backbone of our business collaboration, but it also fundamentally transformed our work culture. We believe that it will continue boosting our productivity no matter how big we grow in the future.”
The performance of Gmail is way better than our previous email system supported by our own server. We don’t have to worry about mail delivery errors anymore, and the hardware and labor costs required have been greatly reduced. For more than eight years, Google Workspace has not only served as the backbone of our business collaboration, but it also fundamentally transformed our work culture. We believe that it will continue boosting our productivity no matter how big we grow in the future.