Kacey Minoso believes people may forget what they saw, but they always remember how a place made them feel. As Program Director of We The Curatours, that belief shapes everything, from the stories she weaves into every walking tour to the way she thinks about running the business behind it.

We The Curatours is an experience-driven tourism initiative based in Iloilo City. Their culinary and heritage walking tours bring together food, storytelling, and culture into one curated route, not just a list of stops, but a way of helping people experience Iloilo more deeply. Locals, tourists, balikbayans, students. People who thought they already knew the city often leave discovering stories they never knew existed.

Running that kind of experience takes more than passion. It takes systems. And for a small, growing team, getting the back-end right matters just as much as the tour itself.

The Challenge: Payment Tracking Across Screenshots and Conversations

Kacey's experience with manual billing goes back to running a small food business with her sisters during the pandemic. Everything was done by hand, confirming payments one by one, chasing screenshots, cross-checking transfers across different conversations.

Nothing was centralized. Payments came in through different channels, confirmations happened over chat, and keeping track of who had paid and who hadn't meant constantly switching between threads and spreadsheets. As operations grew, the mental load grew with it.

For an events and tours business where preparation starts well before participants show up, food portions coordinated, establishments confirmed, resources allocated, having unreliable payment tracking wasn't just inconvenient. It created real operational risk. A no-show or an untracked payment doesn't just affect the books. It affects the experience for everyone else on the tour.

Finding Mochi

Kacey was introduced to Mochi through her work with We The Curatours and saw firsthand how it could be used for registrations and payments.

What clicked immediately was the concept of payment links connected to registration forms. Instead of manually following up with each participant after they signed up, the link created a direct path from registration to payment, removing a whole layer of back-and-forth that used to eat into the team's time.

For a small team still building its systems step by step, that kind of simplicity matters. Speed and convenience aren't luxuries for a growing initiative. They're what make it possible to keep running well.

How We The Curatours Uses Mochi Today

The feature Kacey keeps coming back to is payment links.

They're easy to use, easy to integrate into registration forms, and straightforward enough that participants don't need guidance to get through the process. For a small team or a growing initiative, removing friction from the payment step is one of the most practical things you can do.

By embedding Mochi's payment links directly into their registration forms, the entire flow changed. Participants no longer needed to be chased individually. They could proceed to payment right after signing up, with no extra coordination required on the team's end.

For Kacey, who also handles spreadsheets and participant tracking, having payments flow into a more structured process meant less time managing loose ends and more time focused on the actual experience. The process now feels more professional, not just for the team, but for the participants going through it.

The Results

What's Next for We The Curatours

Kacey has a clear picture of where she wants things to go. One of her biggest operational challenges is no-shows, people who inquire or register but don't follow through on the day of the tour. For an experience-based business, that's a real cost: food portions prepared, establishments coordinated, resources committed.

She's hoping for a more integrated registration, payment, and attendance flow, one that creates a stronger sense of commitment from the moment someone signs up. It's the kind of feature that would make Mochi an even more natural fit for tours, workshops, and events businesses across the Philippines.

The vision for We The Curatours goes beyond Iloilo too. As the initiative grows, so does the need for systems that can scale with it, handling more participants, more tours, and more complexity without adding more manual work to the team's plate.

We The Curatours is an experience-driven tourism initiative based in Iloilo City bringing locals and visitors closer to Iloilo's food, heritage, and culture through curated walking tours. Learn more about how Mochi supports events and tours businesses in the Philippines here.