In the Chinese calendar, 12 years is a full cycle – every animal has had its turn, and you’re back where you started. Well, Hermione Joye, who has just stepped down as Google’s Head of Travel, APAC, has spent exactly a dozen years in the region and as someone born in the Year of the Rat, she laughs, “Well, the rat’s been kept on their toes.”
Joye has relocated back to Australia for family reasons and moving into a new unit within Google. But before she closed the door on travel, I sat down with her for an exit interview that doubled as a decade-plus retrospective on an industry that, as she puts it, “disrupts itself all the time.”
She looks back on her career arc from junior sales team member – “very green, not knowing a thing about the industry or how to drive success, ROAS was a newer term to her” – to the executive who represented Google to an Asian travel industry that, for years, wasn’t sure whether to trust it.
From vacation rentals to vibe coding
You could say Joye’s 12 years coincided with online travel’s most volatile stretch. She recalls arriving in Singapore just as Airbnb and the vacation rental category were first disrupting the market, while mobile was upending it from a completely different direction.
“You were having two very different disruptions and they were momentous movements,” she says. “They had an impact on the way people travelled, and then they had an impact on the way people bought travel and how they consume travel.”
She remembers her first appearance at the WiT Singapore conference, on stage fielding the era’s defining question: are OTAs going to kill the brand? “It was a very real question then,” she recalls the debate in which her team representing brands won.
At the time, more than half of travel bookings in Asia were still happening offline. The shift that followed – the OTA land grab, the Expedia and Booking Holdings acquisition sprees, hotels and suppliers scrambling to respond – was just the opening act, she says.
Then came COVID, and travel “came to a very sharp stop.”
The frenemy years
It’s in the COVID chapter that Joye said turned things around as far as Google’s acceptance in the market went.
When she started, there was suspicion and scepticism around Google and what it was doing in travel – whether it was a friend or enemy. After all, this was the company that was earning billions of dollars from travel and yet was launching products that disintermediated its own customers.
“I was quite shocked by the response of the industry to Google when I moved into it,” she admits. “That was the feeling – a bit uncomfortable, a bit curious.”
During COVID, when travel stopped, she says Google leaned into partnerships at the moment the industry needed it most: building Destination Insights for governments and travelers, reworking Google’s search results to surface real-time hotel closures, and localising tools that had been built for a US-centric world into Vietnamese as readily as Japanese or English.
Whether that goodwill earned during the pandemic years has actually closed the trust gap, she’s more circumspect.
Asked whether the industry now has more empathy for Google – a fellow giant now being disrupted by AI the way it once disrupted everyone else – Joye smiles, and says, “I don’t think there’s empathy for us”, but what’s changed is that “people now see us as someone that is assistive, and as a thought partner.”
This support has yielded substantial results across markets that bear little resemblance to their former offline state.
Indeed, as detailed in the Google/Visa SEA Travel Trends 2026 Report co-authored by Joye, digital travel spending across Southeast Asia expanded by 13.3% in 2025 – outstripping everyday essential categories by a factor of 3.3 – while online travel Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in the region reached $82 billion with revenue hitting $24 billion (Google x Temasek x Bain e-Conomy SEA 2025 Report).
Today, AI, unlike the mobile era, has no hardware barrier, no education barrier, no language barrier – “someone sitting in Cambodia can be vibe coding” – which she argues has neutralised the playing field and pushed Google into partner mode almost by necessity, competition included.
Asia’s leapfrog question
We turned to the trend of Asia leapfrogging the rest of the world on mobile and social commerce, and if that pattern was set to repeat with AI.
There’s no definitive answer to that, she says, but she points to Asia’s outsized Gen Z population and its comfort switching between AI tools as evidence of appetite but is careful to note that disruption so far has shown up more on the operations and productivity side of the business than in a genuinely new AI-native front end.
“I haven’t seen great disruption from there yet in travel,” she says.
She’s also wary of over-indexing on AI as the channel.
Saying that travel inspiration has shifted from “micro-moments” to “nano-moments” with surge in adoption & dependency on video + social, she argues that AI is one input among several, not a replacement for search, video or maps.
That evolution mirrors how Asian consumers now plan trips: Google research shows the traditional planning block has splintered into rapid micro-sessions averaging just 4.5 minutes across more than 20 separate digital touchpoints.
Regarding AI, localized content has undoubtedly grown more vital: almost 70% of AI prompts in Southeast Asia are submitted in native languages, with Vietnam (89%), Thailand (87%), and Indonesia (84%) leading the region (Google Gemini Southeast Asia Report 2026).
“AI has become a core component as opposed to a nice-to-have,” she says, “but it’s not the foundational one.”
Video, in particular, gets equal billing in her account of what actually drives bookings in a region with, by her account, the highest video-watch rates globally – brand recall built through video content, she argues, is what determines who gets remembered at the point of booking.
What she’ll miss
How does she feel about leaving travel and Asia at a time when things are just beginning to get exciting again, she admits, “Of course, I’m sad.”
“I grew up in travel, I got to travel across Asia but more than the places, I’ll miss the people who keep showing up. People in this industry are bright and have passion and then seem to really invest in the industry. I’ll miss that familiarity. I’ll miss that camaraderie.”
Her parting advice to the industry navigating the next disruption: “Agility and curiosity, and don’t be afraid.”
And she adds, “If you’re not embracing AI, then you’re not doing it right.”
