Ravi Chandran
If you are wistfully scrolling through your past Instagram travel photos and wondering when you can book your next holiday – UPGREAT Virtual Vacay by Great Eastern, promises to bring your holiday to you!
Great Eastern’s new virtual travel and booking platform offers the comfort and safety of travelling from your own home, and if #FOMO is too much to bear, you can even start booking your next holiday right now. UPGREAT Virtual Vacay is launched in collaboration with lifestyle and travel website The Travel Intern and popular shopping platform RebateMango.
UPGREAT rewards users with exclusive lifestyle dining and shopping privileges. It is a single mobile platform where users can enjoy their loyalty benefits and rewards digitally, transfer and share with their friends and family members. Users can accumulate reward points as there is no expiry date for these points.
Vacay from the Comfort of Your Couch
Teleport yourself to five exciting and well-loved destinations of interest – Japan, New Zealand, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam – through a series of immersive curated virtual tours with virtual guide Sam. Customise your travel experience and decide where to go, what to do, and even what to eat, in a snap!
Missing Japan? Now you can virtually Go-Kart through Shibuya, visit Tokyo’s craziest bar and train like a ninja at the Oshino Ninja Village. Then, pop over to New Zealand and see nature at its most beautiful. Wander around the Hobbiton movie set, hike at Marokopa Falls and for the brave-hearted, conquer New Zealand’s tallest bungee or swing upside-down across the Nevis River! Feeling hungry after all that adventure? Check out Taiwan’s famous night markets or take a food tour at Jiufen Old Street.
The virtual tours for Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan are now available on the platform, and travellers can look forward to the Korea and Vietnam tours in the coming weeks.
Go Local
Need a break from the WFH arrangements? Check out the customised staycation itineraries designed to help you uncover new sights and sounds in Singapore. Explore iconic areas such as Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Downtown Core – simply book your accommodation, walking tours, restaurant reservations, and start exploring our fair isle on foot, and support Local!
UPGREAT Your Bookings for More Convenience & Rewards
The platform also offers attractive promotions, rewards, and bundles with travel partners such as Booking.com, Hotels Combined and Agoda. Book your trips now conveniently through UPGREAT, Great Eastern’s lifestyle and rewards app, without worrying about cancellation fees.
What’s more, to celebrate the launch of UPGREAT Virtual Vacay, earn Double UPGREAT points through the app’s “Shop & Earn” feature when making travel bookings through Agoda, Klook, Expedia and many more. With an extensive retailer access powered by RebateMango, the app offers users a seamless and rewarding online shopping experience. The UPGREAT app is free for anyone to join and is not restricted to Great Eastern customers.
CHOPE Your Insurance Now!
To provide you with greater peace of mind, simply register on the platform and receive a complimentary one-year GREAT Value Protect plan, which provides a daily hospital cash benefit (up to 14 days) if one is hospitalised due to COVID-19, Dengue Fever, food poisoning, accidents, Yellow Fever or Zika, as well as death benefits due to accidents or COVID-19. UPGREAT also brings to consumers Travel E@sy, which allows you to “chope” (or reserve) your travel insurance plan for any future travel from 2021 at 60% off regular prices.
Why Vacay Virtually with UPGREAT
Ryan Cheong, Managing Director of Digital for Business, Great Eastern, said: “The love for travel is such a big part of our Singaporean DNA. With UPGREAT Virtual Vacay, we aim to bring customised experiences and travel benefits to our hundreds of thousands of UPGREAT members and all who can’t wait to get out and about. As the Life company, we aim to delight our followers on our digital channels in the areas most exciting to them, and UPGREAT Virtual Vacay is a great way to do this. Like most Singaporeans, we believe in planning ahead for later.”
Hendric Tay, co-founder of The Travel Intern said: “With limited opportunities for physical travel, all we wanted was to be transported to our favourite destinations. Collaborating with Great Eastern to design virtual travel journeys was immensely fun for the team. We hope this can bring delight to anyone who has had to cancel their travel adventures this year, regardless of their travel styles.”
In July, Great Eastern announced that it was collaborating with RebateMango to launch a new dimension of rewards on UPGREAT, Great Eastern’s all-in-one rewards platform with an exciting and comprehensive range of dining, lifestyle and shopping rewards, as part of the leading insurer’s regional consumer strategy to engage its customers online.
Through this direct integration, Great Eastern’s UPGREAT members will experience a new seamless journey and the opportunity to receive more UPGREAT points when they shop at over 500 localised retailers such as Shopee, Agoda, AliExpress, Booking.com, Lazada and more. This smooth and easy shopping access allows users to earn UPGREAT points, which can then be exchanged for KrisFlyer miles, Shell Select vouchers, GrabFood vouchers, dining vouchers from various food establishments and other attractive rewards, bringing greater value to users as they earn more by shopping. UPGREAT presently has 168,000 members in Singapore and the app is free for anyone to join and is not restricted to Great Eastern policyholders.
RebateMango, which powers the retailer access within the UPGREAT app, has been available as a rewards shopping platform for over three years, providing users with a choice of rewards such as cashback, air miles and loyalty points whenever they shop online. Currently available in four markets, RebateMango was previously available strictly on the RebateMango platform, and has now moved into Business-to-Business solutions as well with UPGREAT by Great Eastern as the first partner to launch.
The partnership provides UPGREAT members with a seamless and rewarding online shopping experience. By using RebateMango to power the merchant offerings, UPGREAT members simply need to open the app, select the retailer and start shopping to earn UPGREAT Points. At the same time, it allows UPGREAT to enjoy easy scalability in their offering to users.
