Confession first: the woman opening a cruise conference is not, by her own admission, a cruiser.
“I am not a big cruiser,” Yeoh Siew Hoon told delegates at Cruise World Asia in Singapore on Wednesday morning, before explaining why she was on stage anyway – WiT, the travel platform she founded in 2005, and TravelWeekly both sit under Northstar Travel Group. “When family calls, you don’t say no.”
It set the tone for a 10-minute talk that had less to do with cruise itineraries than with a much bigger question hanging over the whole travel industry: what happens when you’re handed the keys and nobody gives you the manual.
WiT turns 21 this year – the platform marks its flagship conference, “21: A New Beginning” from September 30 to October 2 – and Yeoh built her talk around that milestone. She recalled her own 21st birthday, fresh off a newspaper internship in Penang covering weddings, fires and murders, feeling ready to take on the world without knowing what was coming next.
“This moment in travel feels exactly like that,” she said. “Generative AI has handed us the keys to something. We just don’t know what’s coming.”
Her answer was four trends she argued the room – cruise executives, tourism boards, destination marketers – could not afford to miss.
The shift within the shift
WiT itself was born at the start of the last inflection point, when travel moved from offline to online. Citing Phocuswright data, Yeoh noted APAC online penetration climbed to 58% by 2022 and is projected to hit 71% by 2028.
Now, she said, a second shift is unfolding inside that first one, powered by AI – “the shift to watch, the story to tell.”
From search box to prompt box
The industry’s front door is changing shape, Yeoh said, citing a Booking.com study on how APAC travellers use AI: excitement is running at 97% in Singapore and 95% across the region, but trust lags badly behind – just 3% in Singapore, 8% across APAC. “Surely an opportunity for humans,” she said, “if we believe we can be trusted more than machines.”
She pointed to Trip.com’s TripGenie data showing AI now threading through the entire journey, not just the booking moment, and to Klook’s KREATORVERSE 2026 event in Phu Quoc, where the company rolled out upgraded Kreator Shops to more than 30,000 creators across 88 markets– collapsing scattered affiliate posts into a single shoppable link. Creator-led bookings on the platform grew 246% last year, she said.
“The new front door is not a homepage, but a ‘person’ you follow,” Yeoh said – the travel agent, reborn “in more fashionable clothes.”
She also flagged Instinct, a WhatsApp-based personal agent she has been testing, founded last year by a 23-year-old and now valued at $2.5 billion. She has used it to book movie tickets, order wine and track flight prices. “I am sure one day book a cruise for me,” she said.
The local factor
Then she came to the hot topic of visitor crowding and congestion, the trend she said the room needed to sit with most. She cited James Thornton, CEO of Intrepid Travel, whom she’d interviewed at WiT Queenstown: “If I could redesign travel tomorrow, it would be that more of it benefits the local communities providing the services in the first place.”
Yeoh brought the point home to cruise directly. She described watching a ship disgorge thousands of day visitors in Corfu’s old town in June, and noted the port is expected to become the first in the Adriatic to cross one million cruise passenger movements in 2026.
“Growth comes at a cost,” she said, “we have been slow to put it on the balance sheet” – pointing to backlash spreading from Barcelona to Venice to Kyoto, and to Catalunya Tourism Board’s pivot from mass marketing to micro-targeting by mindset rather than volume.
Travel still makes people happy
She closed on an upbeat note, citing Booking.com’s new Travel Happiness Index: 98% of APAC travellers associate travel with positive emotion, 84% say it helps them reset mentally, and nine in ten would rather adapt a disrupted trip than cancel it outright. Seventy-three percent, she noted, are now actively prioritising local experiences when they plan.
“Happy travellers need happy locals,” she said, tying trend four back to trend three. “Perhaps it is time we started measuring local community happiness as well.”
She left delegates with a challenge rather than a conclusion: cruise in Asia, she said, is having its own “21” moment. “The growth is real, the keys are in your hand. The question, same as it was for me, same as it is for WiT, is what you do with them.”
