When you get to the ripe young age of 20, you’re bound to collect lots of stories – not only about the past but lessons for the future.
As WiT marks its 20th year in 2025, we turn the spotlight on our community, our tribe pioneers and leaders, to tell their stories and share their views on the evolution of online travel and technology.
We ask them to look back on the past and their early days, reflect on the present and why this moment is pivotal for online travel and get them to imagine the future, the next 20.
This special WiT Studio series, “Conversations On Turning 20”, is the collective story of WiT.
As a Chinese saying goes, 以古为鉴，可以知兴替
“By using history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of things.”
Episode 3: Fritz Demopoulos, Co-founder, Qunar/CEO, Queen’s Road Capital
“Maybe the multi-market model might have worked”
Picture the scene. Hong Kong airport in 2005, yes, the same year WiT was established. Three buddies sat down and talked about what they should do next. They had just sold their start-up sports website to Tom.com (which went bust in the dot.com bubble).
Why don’t we look to Google, one said? Yes, why don’t we do a vertical search, said another. And so they discussed four categories – medical, financial, automotive and travel.
Well, clearly Fritz Demopoulos, Douglas Khoo and Chen Chao Zhuang made the smart choice – because they started Qunar, China’s first travel search engine, and six years later, in June 2011, sold the majority stake to Baidu for US$306 million investment.
When WiT spoke to Demopoulos, a day after the sale, he said, “It’s great, a great accomplishment. I guess I am a free agent, for the first time in six years.”
In that interview with WiT, he recalled why they picked travel, and not the other three categories. He had been inspired by something Barney Harford (then Expedia Asia Pacific boss) said at an event in New York that Google was Expedia’s largest competitor. “That got me thinking – why would an OTA consider a search engine competition?”
As for being a foreigner doing business in China, Demopoulos said, “The number one rule for any entrepreneur is to be self-aware. I was self-aware I wasn’t Chinese – that’s obvious, right? – and there were certain things I couldn’t do but I was also self-aware that there were certain things I could do because I wasn’t Chinese.”
Twenty years on, Demopoulos can look back on Qunar as an adventure which led to bigger and better things in his career.
Here’s what he has to say in this conversation about those early days, when do you make the call between going mono-market or multi-market and his views on what makes the WiT tribe special.
