Kathleen Tan

With this move, she returns to Singapore after almost nine years away, takes on a chief executive role in a company that has great expectations from two of the world’s largest travel brands and gets into a new travel space.

Plus, she’s also about to become a TV celebrity – she will be one of the mentors in Apprentice Asia which stars Datuk Tony Fernandes of AirAsia and airs this May.

My first question – is this change happening because the joint venture is struggling?

“No. It’s because I am coming home and Dan (Lynn, former CEO) wants to do something new and different and Tony asked me why don’t you take this up? I was actually thinking of semi-retirement,” she laughs. (Word is Lynn is working on a travel tech start-up, inspired obviously by Tony Fernandes.)

Not that anyone can imagine Tan semi-retired and now having taken up the reins at the new job, her goal is clear. “My role is to make company profitable and in three to five years, take it to listing.”

Her first priority is to control costs and focus on the 80/20 rule – look at the 20% that’s giving 80% of the revenues – and build that up. So instead of spreading scarce resources thinly, she wants to pick on one or two winners and drill deep into those areas.

“I definitely feel the numbers can be improved. It’s a new start-up, it needed to get the technology going, hire the people and integrateAirAsiaGo into the system. A lot of work’s been done and Dan’s put in the building blocks. Now it’s time to take the blocks and build for growth.”

With Expedia and AirAsia fully behind her, she is confident about taking the joint venture to the next level. “Expedia has ambitions to grow in Asia and this is AirAsia’s stronghold.”

She confesses to being a little nervous “because my reputation precedes me. My team thinks I am tough,” she laughs. “And hotels is a new area for me and I don’t know the Expedia world.”

So there’s lots to learn and competition is intense, and will only intensify. But competition is nothing new to Tan. When she was in the music business, it was also super competitive. “There was indie, mobile, kids downloading online. I worked in Singapore and we didn’t produce any music, we had no content.”

Then with AirAsia, she had to learn everything from scratch from dealing with engineering, flight operations and governments. “The low cost market is so competitive and look at AirAsia today, it has a 60% domestic share,” she says.

“I love to fight, it brings out the best in me.”

She wants to learn more about hotels – how hoteliers work, what makes them tick and what they want from the company. She believes the skills she brings – such as negotiations with governments, airports, tourism-related partners such as credit card companies, banks, running call centres, etc – will come to good use.

“I don’t think the OTA space is all about price. My friends tell me they choose one site over the other because of service. AirAsia deals with 30 million passengers, we can look at what we did there and apply it here.”

Competition will also force players to think out of the box, she says, recalling how AirAsia started using social media to avert a price war with Malaysia Airlines.

One of the keys to a successful OTA business is marketing, an area she is comfortable with. “We are the middleman and although I cannot control technology and hotel supply (those are separate arms run by Expedia), I can give a lot of input.”

Tan also wants to engage with airlines whom she admits have been reluctant to work with the joint venture because of the AirAsia link. “I want to clarify this point to airlines. Expedia sells everything, LCCs are buying a lot of planes, there’s a lot of competition, we have three brands to help sell flights, we understand seasonality.”

AirAsia’s interest in the joint venture is a pure investment play. “I don’t want them to interfere and they don’t.”

She will also work on distinct positioning for the three brands – Expedia, AirAsiaGo and Backick – under the joint venture.

“AirAsiaGo feeds into the AirAsia community and it’s very skewed towards leisure. Expedia is more free and easy and higher end and Backick has a young demographic and is getting a lot of traction. They are three distinct brands offering different value propositions.”

Tan will also leverage her knowledge of Asia to entrench Expedia deeper in the region, and to use the resources of Expedia to grow the brand.

“AirAsiaGo’s new booking engine is built by Expedia for example and there are many areas we can work together. Asia is the area of growth. I know Asia and I know customer behaviour. I love championing Asia, it’s not just about driving the business but seeing the entire region grow and giving travellers another choice.”