As you unwind after the WIT Conference last week and plug back into your work wherever you are, here’s a list of things you should heed and ideas to keep by your bedside as you plan your strategy for 2013.

• You have to lose something to win at something else.

Glenn Fogel (pictured left), head of worldwide strategy and planning, Priceline Group, turned what happened to him as a teenager into a life lesson of focus and grit. Today, he runs an online travel business that sells close to 550,000 room nights a day and that has a market cap of US$30 billion.

• Think of new markets and open travel to everyone 

Gregory Burns (pictured right), Paralympian and artist, overcame his handicap to win medals, break records and fulfill his desire to paint.

Imagine, he said, if travel made itself friendlier to folks like him. While the web has opened the world to everyone, online travel sites do not make it easy to search or plan holidays for the disabled. “Imagine how grateful and loyal we’d be,” he said.

• You got to know what model works for you, stick to it and execute ruthlessly.

It was interesting getting an insight into the difference between the Priceline and Rakuten model.

Priceline’s approach is keeping its brands separate – booking.com and Agoda compete fiercely in the same market.

Rakuten’s strategy is to create one big community into which it sells its products and services under the Rakuten brand and rewards customers for their loyalty. “We want people to buy from people, not the Internet,” is Yoshihisa Yamada’s (senior executive officer of Rakuten) belief.

So create a community and sell to them or sell to them and create a customer database?

• Fix problems that are hard to fix and by so doing, create real value for travellers. 

Rome2Rio interim chairman Rod Cuthbert (pictured right) is trying to fix search that enables travellers to plan end-to-end journeys, beyond the obvious flight city pairs. For too long, he said, innovation has been technology-driven when it should be about fixing real problems.

Flight search is a super crowded space and Google ITA coming into it is going to make things even more crowded. Either you go hyper-local which Wego’s trying to do as it scales and expands into different markets or you differentiate with curated content and help travellers with experiences –like Japan’s travel search site travel.jp – with its specialist content strategy.

• Keep it simple

Of the developers who presented at THack@WIT, the one solution that resonated with me was the “One Click Biz Trip”, developed by the duo from Skyscanner who entered the competition in their personal capacity.

Their promise – to take the choice out of business travel. Fitting that they won as well. Sometimes, you just don’t want to have too many choices.

This was the same message from Mario Jobbe, co-founder of Circos Brand Karma (pictured left), who talked about the importance of simplicity which is “thoughtful reduction”, offering “the minimally satisfying solution at the lowest cost” and “staying true to your roots, being who you are”.

• The hotel space is getting super-competitive so you’d better be paranoid about what’s going to come along and disrupt you. 

RajaKamar is taking a crack at the online hotel model in Indonesia and MakeMyTrip is trying to burrow its way into the hotel space in South-east Asia.  The issue of price parity will not go away – while it’s good for hoteliers, is it good for the customer? If a can of Coke can be sold at different prices depending on the channels, why not a hotel room? Amit Saberwal, chief business officer ofMakeMyTrip (pictured below) put up his hand for rate parity being bad for the customer. 

The key thing to remember, Fogel reminded all of us, is never sell anything below your gross net margin.

A new generation of travellers is favouring social stay models like Airbnb and Travelmob – and hoteliers in Asia don’t seem to get that. Airbnb sells 1 million room nights a year in New York alone. Travelmob, which recently received US$1 million funding, is determined to make an indent in the market. True, there may be questions around its legalities but it is clear they are answering a customer need. Free wifi is the main reason, by the way, that customers favour staying in private apartments versus hotels.

Although someone said that online travel’s 20 years old and it’s hard to disrupt, T Fuad, co-founder of Travelmob, is ready to take on the challenge, as stated in this post-WIT blog 

• We all know China is massive but we need to know how it’s changing.

China will become the largest travel market in 2013. Its value of US$103 billion will trump Japan’s US$99 billion, according to PhoCusWright. Online travel share in China stands at 13% compared with Japan’s 32%, so heaps of room to grow.

Social and mobile are huge in China. Travel apps are mushrooming for every stage of the journey – from where to go, to search and book, to in a trip to post-trip. Chinese travellers like to share at every stage of the trip.

Qunar, China’s largest travel search site, has seven apps and has a huge team of developers working on R&D to develop more, said its executive vice president, Denise Peng (pictured above right). Mobile accounts for almost a quarter of searches, we were told.

Melissa Yang (pictured above left), co-founder of Tujia, said one leading OTA saw 10 million downloads of its app and another major OTA is seeing 12% of its bookings coming through mobile. Her company will soon launch an app to allow customers to search and book vacation rental.

• Mobile is the strategy. 

If you’re not doing mobile, you’re in trouble, said Brett Henry, vice president commercial and marketing of Abacus international (pictured right).

“You don’t need a mobile strategy, mobile is the strategy,” he reiterated.

Every market in Asia is moving towards mobile.  According to Google, mobile queries in the APAC travel category are seeing a 146% growth with leading markets being Japan, India and Australia. And 62% of mobile travel queries in Asia Pacific are for hotels and destinations.

Ali Yilmaz, head of travel for South-east Asia, shared data that showed 23% of travel queries in APAC came from mobile devices in the second quarter of 2012 and there is a forecast that travel queries on mobile will reach 30-43% by 2014.

Drilling deeper into markets, 28% of all hotel queries in Japan came from smartphones and tablets are 40% of mobile traffic in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

• Sharing is the new loving

When the panel of Millennials (left) was asked what would be their dream travel app, it was clear sharing’s at the heart of their desires.

Plan and share, book and share, travel and share, return and share – that’s what we want, they said.

Travellers want to create images of themselves, tell their own stories – we should facilitate that, said George Mitchell, co-founder of Circos Brand Karma. And as Tujia’s Melissa Yang observed, all social is not travel but all travel is social.

Yes, we should be able to measure the value of a like, as Timothy Hughes, vice president marketing of Agoda, said in one of the sessions, but it’s hard to put a value on a customer sharing their experience of their flight, hotel and trip.

• Watch out, TripAdvisor’s moving into attractions  

When asked what she’d be spending most of her time on in 2013, Christine Petersen, president for business, TripAdvisor (pictured right), said, “Attractions.”  When TripAdvisor says something, you’d better pay attention. Paired with its City Guides, you can bet local, social and mobile is the direction it’s headed.

• Experiment fast, hire mavericks

We’re living in a world of accelerated change, said Prof Adrian David Cheok, and the human brain is evolving. Frontal lobes of kids’ brains are being shaped by the new world they live in. We are learning differently, multi-tasking differently, we are all striving to remain relevant as individuals. This will create new sets of workers, customers and travellers with different expectations.

Businesses have to respond by being more creative, and experimenting fast. If innovation is about lowering the cost of failure, then businesses cannot afford not to innovate.

And they cannot afford not to have mavericks in their organisations – people who are not afraid to shake things up, people who do it for love, not money, and people who believe – as Stephan Ekbergh, CEO of Travelstart (pictured left),  declared from his DJ console at WIT 2012.