At the WIT*e event last Thursday, Brett Henry, Vice President Marketing and Vice President India of Abacus International singled out six categories for travel start-ups – gambling, deals, metasearch, content aggregation, user experience and mobile.

Gambling was worth US$4 billion in Singapore in 2010 and US$23.5 billlion in Macau – the latter is almost four times that of the US$6 billion in Las Vegas.

Deals, another hot category, was attracting a lot of attention and a new-start up in Thailand,Ensogo, was one to watch. In Singapore, Groupon had bought Beeconomic. Women were the majority of customers for deal sites, he said.

Metasearch was an area yet to be played out. In China, Qunar had staked its position and was the largest travel website in terms of traffic with 37 million visitors.

Henry said Indonesia was a primer for a Qunar model given the fragmentation of both domestic air and hotel content. “This is one of the largest and most attractive untapped metasearch opportunities in the planet,” he said.

In terms of user experience, tablets and smartphones were enabling companies to come up with different customer interfaces. Jetsetter, which calls itself the Groupon for luxury travel, for instance, has an iPad app that has changed customer experience considerably, said Henry.(See demo of app here)

In the area of content aggregation, he cited Vietnamese OTA Chudu which had done a good job of aggregating hotel content in the country. Room 77 allows customers to “select the view you want to wake up to – much like selecting the seat you want on the plane”. Flextrip, which finds things and deals for you to do during your trips, was about in-destination content. 

Finally, in the mobile area, the battle was between mobile and html5 and organizations that were using html5 to develop customized mobile experiences in the form of apps or mobile-specific browsers were winning.

AirAsia vs Tiger – AirAsia wins against Tiger’s website crammed into a mobile device – and among Indian OTAs, Yatra against ClearTrip – the latter wins with its app.

He said there was lots of room for start-ups in the online travel space in Asia, an area that was just beginning to play out.

Also speaking at WIT*e, Mohan Belani of Optimatic, the leading community-centric media network for entrepreneurs and professionals in the Asian web sector, said the trends in travel pretty much mirror what was happening in the overall web space in Asia.

Belani, a co-founder of e27, the technology site focused on web innovation in Asia, is himself launching a social gaming site in Indonesia called “gokil” meaning “kick-ass”.

He said gaming was a hot category and he was open to exploring tie-ups with travel – this was after he learnt of the joint venture between travel.jp, Japan’s travel metasearch site, with Colopl, one of Japan’s top mobile gaming companies.

Mr Belani, who manages Optimatic, said the only thing holding up innovation in Singapore was the “desperate” lack of developers. As such, he’s had to look outside the country and the Philippines was a good alternative. “They speak English and they are tech-savvy,” he said.

“It’s not cheap though,” he said. “People think it’s inexpensive there but you still have to pay pretty high salaries – like US$1,500 a month for good developers.”

Belani co-produced Echelon, the conference run by e27. One of its highlights is the Echelon Startup Launchpad where companies pitch their ideas to investors.

Asked for the success rate of previous winners, Belani said it had been pretty good – about two out of three go on to build up businesses. Personally, he wished he had gotten into the tech sector sooner.

WIT will be curating and running two travel-focused sessions at Echelon 2011, on June 16 and 17, in Singapore.