Roger Sharp on AI, inbound tourism, and why Queenstown wants to be the Southern Hemisphere’s travel tech hub
Roger Sharp has a theory about travel. “Somebody once said to me, travel is like water, it always gets through.” Amidst geopolitical instability and constantly redirected flight paths, people adapt, routes shift, and they keep moving.
It’s a fitting philosophy for someone who is now trying to build a travel tech economy in a destination that’s renowned for adventure tourism.
Sharp chairs Technology Queenstown, an initiative we’ve partnered with to run the inaugural WiT Queenstown (July 20–21, 2026). Its longer-term ambition is to make the adventure capital of the world the southern hemisphere’s go-to travel tech hub. The goal? A billion dollars of tech GDP per annum within 20 years, backed by Accenture and a coalition of New Zealand corporates.
Like many things, the rationale dates back to the pandemic. Covid exposed just how dependent Queenstown’s economy was on tourism – roughly 60% of it. The response was to diversify, not away from tourism, but toward tourism plus technology. With 3 million visitors a year already coming through, the adjacency practically builds itself.
Watch the full interview:
On the state of travel fundraising
Q1 this year was running about 40% behind last year. But having reviewed 33 early-stage companies for this year’s Global Startup Pitch by WiT and Phocuswright, Sharp is not bearish. “If you’re solving a need for a customer, if you’ve got product market fit, if you’re really doing something meaningful, you will raise money and you will grow,” he says.
His most compelling near-term opportunity sits in B2B. The hotel check-in problem, like being asked if it’s your first stay when you’ve visited so many times you’re basically a regular, is more than an annoyance; it’s a fixable data problem.
“There are B2B businesses fueled by AI joining the threads. They’ll join together your WhatsApp, your email, your voice message. They’ll work out that you’ve been 27 times previously, that you want a spa before work tomorrow, that you’re gluten-free and need a hypoallergenic pillow,” Sharp explains. He says the technology exists and the margins are finally catching up.
The OTA disruption question
On the B2C side, Sharp is watching the same question everyone in travel tech is watching – will AI finally upend the OTA model? He thinks a new entrant could reinvent the online travel agency, but he also thinks the incumbents like Expedia, Booking, and Agoda aren’t going down without a serious fight.
“It’s going to take a long time for consumers to trust an LLM with their credit card,” he says, “and at the same time, you’ve got these giant and hugely successful companies re-engaging themselves actively. They have huge cash flows. They can afford to do it.”
He compares this period to the banking sector, specifically when neobanks arrived a decade ago, the traditional banks were written off. They’re still very much here. “I bank with my existing bank, but I also bank with Revolut. Revolut is worth between 70 and 100 billion dollars. It’s an amazing company and guess what? It hasn’t killed the banks.”
India is the one to watch
New Zealand’s recently signed FTA combined with an Air NZ–Air India codeshare and direct flights from 2028, points to a significant inbound opportunity. Sharp puts the number of active trip considerers from just two Indian cities at 14 million. And Indian visitors, he notes, spend at per-capita levels on par with Americans and Brits.
The question, he says, isn’t whether they’ll come. It’s whether New Zealand is ready for them.
That readiness question also applies domestically. Queenstown’s 3 million annual visitors are supported by 20,000 ratepayers. Sharp says the tension lies in specific bottlenecks within the tourism ecosystem. “I think value per tourist is a little more important than massive tourism, which leads to over-tourism. We have one social license, and if we lose it, it takes years to recover.”
Who’s coming to WiT Queenstown
We’ve got a stellar lineup already in place for WiT Queenstown. Sharp himself will be on stage with the CEO of Air New Zealand, a former Chief Digital Officer with a stated goal of building the world’s best digital airline, along with the CEO of Agoda, who’s deep in the platform’s agentic transformation, and SiteMinder’s CEO Sankar Narayan, among 55-plus speakers.
Getting them there, Sharp admits, wasn’t hard once one word was mentioned. “When we said it’s in Queenstown, they went, ‘Yes, I’m there.’”
Watch the full interview above to hear Sharp go deeper on what agentic AI is actually changing in business travel, and what he’s seeing in the startups he thinks are worth paying attention to.
Click here for the full WiT Queenstown programme.
Click here to get your tickets now.
