LCCs in North Asia hampered by archaic airport regulations
Airport regulations are ‘archaic’ and ‘limiting’, said low-cost carrier (LCC) panelists at the CAPA Asia Aviation Summit 2015 in Singapore this week.Speakers at the North Asian LCC panel slammed over-regulation, although where safety was concerned, regulation is both adequate and needed.Part [...]
GeoTourist wants to walk with you
Shaon Talukder, a young technorepreneur from London, knows how to pitch. When I first met him at the WIT 2015 conference, he raised an interesting question: what if your business idea puts others out of work? Not that GeoTourist, a location-based social media platform has any dark ambitions. In fact [...]
The best of travel tech: Bag tags and movie downloads
Technological advancement in travel doesn’t always come encased in a shiny new device. Take the humble luggage tag: essential yet largely unchanged since the advent of mass air transit. Recent increases in self-service check-ins and untrained hands handling sticky baggage tags can complicate matte [...]
Future Travel expo reveals ‘magical customer moments’
Imagine effortless travel, aided by technology that anticipates, aggregates and pushes relevant information at the right time. This was the vision presented by a panel of speakers at the Future Travel Experience expo in Singapore this week. According to panelists, technology is not the barrier: i [...]
Checking in with chat apps
Technology is often maligned as the chief cause of decline in human interaction, but it has also proven to be a force for good. We can now connect with each other (and with institutions) with more ease than in any other time in history. This level of connectedness can, however, be a double-edged swo [...]
Alitrip wants to innovate and disrupt travel – here’s how
What do a discounted hotel room, a tube of lipstick and a frying pan have in common? They’re all available for purchase on the Alibaba platform, the Chinese e-commerce site that’s bigger than Amazon and eBay combined.Alitrip, formerly Taobao Travel, was established as an independent, one-stop on [...]
Geeks rule the world at the Great WIT Debate
by Mar Pages, luxury travel writerThe Great WIT Debate at the final session of the WIT 2015 conference pit Bobby Healy, CTO of CarTrawler against Stephan Ekbergh, former deejay and CEO of Travelstart. The topic? Whether geeks should rule the world.Bobby's argument is that a geek is defined as a pecu [...]
MakeMyTrip eyes mobile market
Stock prices are no indication of how a company is performing, said Deep Kalra, CEO and founder of Indian OTA MakeMyTrip (MMT) at the opening session of the WIT conference on October 21.Once the disruptor, MMT took the world by storm with a phenomenal IPO listing on NASDAQ in 2010. Despite falling s [...]
Niche properties seek a moment in the sun
By Mar Pages, luxury travel writerTravel experience is the new buzzword. At the final day of the WIT conference, we heard from a wide spectrum of businesses involved in creating unique experiences. At one end, the larger travel OTAs and, at the other, the hoteliers and food experts who are trying to [...]
When mega marketplaces hop on the travel bandwagon
By Alisha SomanasEveryone’s jumping on the online travel industry bandwagon, and the mega marketplaces like Alibaba and Rakuten are no exception. But when you see what they’ve got on their hands, it’s no surprise they want to wield what they’ve got. They’ve found a way to differentiate in [...]
