It was good to run into so many travel friends at Echelon 2012, Asia’s digital start-up event. In fact, it’s become impossible to miss them as travel becomes an increasingly hot category for investors and entrepreneurs in the region.

There’s money flowing in from Europe – perhaps taking flight from the embattled Euro zone – and the US, and a lot from within Asia, as investors seek out opportunities in a region where consumers are taking to mobile and the web like moths to candles.

At the event, a deal was signed at the event between Tigris Capital and SPRING and The Luxe Nomad, a new travel flash sale site founded by Stephanie Chai (left). This will be launched in the next few months, says Chai, a former model.

“A start-up begins with an idea, is built by a team but truly grows from funding. We’re very excited to be working with Tigris Capital and SPRING as we share the same vision of changing the travel industry in Asia,” she said.

There are many others like Chai who want to change the travel industry. Chai is going right up against Steven Gong, who founded ImpulseFlyer, also a private sale flash deals site which he said is going from strength to strength. “Travellers are looking for high-end experiences and families are a growing segment,” he said during the panel on travel.

Wego recently acquired Valadoo in Indonesia; Flocations, the travel search site, is being incubated by JFDI Asia; TripFlick, “your personal travel guide”, is out to change the way you experience a destination; and Travelmob, offering “local accommodation”, is about to be launched in Singapore and will focus on Asia content – think Airbnb for Asia.

Other than flash sales, short-term rentals was the key topic discussed at the travel session moderated by Fritz Demopoulous, CEO of Queen’s Road Capital. On the panel were three start-ups focused on short-term rentals – Frederico Folcia, founder & CEO, Roomorama, Weston Hankins, CTO, 9flats and Adrian Li, co-founder & CEO, Airizu, described as the Airbnb for China.

All three seemed unfazed by the recent news in Singapore that the government was cracking down on “illegal” short-term rentals, saying this was a grey area in most cities they operate in. The URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority) states that private residential properties may only be rented out or sublet for six months or more, as ‘transient occupiers’ could inconvenience other residents.

Li believes the short-term rental space is creating “an underlying layer of distribution that’s enabling entrepreneurs to create different experiences” and is undercutting the “franchise economy hotel” segment. His site has 70,000 listings and has crossed the 250,000 mark in transactions. He said. “We are offering cheaper accommodation alternatives and allowing smaller businesses to scale with us.”

Folcia of Roomorama, which lists 60,000 professionally-managed properties, sees a huge opportunity for growth in mobile transactions and believes technology will solve the problem of instant availability booking.

Currently, these sites are dependent on apartment owners to respond to customer requests and most of them list on several sites – making it difficult to offer real-time availability and instant transaction.

“The availability is often not up to date. You can send a host an enquiry and it can take from one hour to a week. One way is to have high touch but if you want to scale, technology has to step in,” said Folcia.

“Tech will play an important role in building trust,” he added, adding that Asians still weren’t used to the idea of staying in someone else’s apartment. “Instant availability is the end game, and it will be facilitated by mobile.”

Li said that one way Airizu has overcome the trust issue was to have a huge offline team. It has 80 people in eight hubs, scouting 70 cities, checking on accommodation.

“Our priority waa to build supply, it was important to have scale. Once we reached critical mass, the 80-20 rule applies – so you then focus on where your bookings are happening. Eighty percent of our bookings are into five cities.”

He said that unlike Ctrip, where a lot of transactions still happen offline, Airizu was a 100% online business. “To increase conversion, we contact the customer to finalise the booking. We find the highest conversion happens within 60 minutes of enquiry. Once they have booked, we then move them to the lower cost of transacting.”

Hankins, who worked on the Couchsurfing founding team, said six years ago people said the idea of sleeping on people’s couches was not possible. “Now people say, I can do that too.”

He said that sites such as 9flats was enabling travellers to stay in local places and was benefitting event organisers whose delegates may prefer alternative accommodation.

Talking about the mobile trend, he said he was excited by the development of apps that “tailor walks for you” or “suggest places to stay”.

While he said the 9flats app was not “very friendly” right now, 7% of transactions were already happening on mobile.

However he said the phase of exploration was still difficult to do on a mobile device. “Guests want to see pictures, maps, street views, explore, this is hard to do on mobile device, you can’t tap between windows yet. For this phase, big screens are very important.

“The mobile is important for taking specific actions – for the host to respond in 60 mins whether he can let the person stay or not.”

Building a friendly user interface for the host is also challenging. “Their goals are not the same. They want to share with the world, they don’t care if it’s 9flats or Airbnb or a Chinese website. They put it out everywhere and they have to manage availability. A product catering to them is difficult.”

There is no standard of communicating yet – so maybe a GDS-like solution is needed, said the panelists.

As for demand generation, all three said that Google remained the primary path to conversion while Facebook was good for recommendations. “We need to use Facebook to give them more reasons to convert,” said Folcia.

Li said that most of Airizu’s conversions come from either Qunar or Baidu. “The issue is how to look for traffic alternatives – SEO doesn’t work that well in China. We have to use guerilla tactics.” One of which involved giving away chicken wings during a social media exercise it ran in universities in China.

Li said this was a huge success, leading the moderator Demopoulos to call it “chicken wing optimization”.

Hey, whatever works, right?