Letter from Amsterdam: Scale Infinity War and Local Avengers
The promise of summer is in the air as I walk through the streets of Amsterdam. The smells from both the canals and coffee shops waft through the air as I stroll aimlessly in a city made for walking and cycling, although these days, bicycles seem to have taken over.
I find crossing the streets in [...]
Wegogo takes a long shot at the long tail – can outsiders to travel and China make a go of it?
They are not your usual travel tech startups. First, they are hardly in the first blush of youth. They had successful corporate careers in blue chip companies in Singapore before they took the plunge into their first travel startup in 2014.
Second, their office is not in some cool co-working space [...]
Grand Park City Hall rolls out app to map customer experience, capture data
It’d be fair to say that hotels have largely lost the booking battle to OTAs, but there’s one area they are trying to fight back to capture customer data and that’s in the in-stay experience.
After all, that’s when they have the captive audience from the moment of check-in to check-out; [...]
Hail the future drone-based society – Kotaro Chiba bets big on drones and inbound tourism
Drones will be to society what the mobile phone is now – they will connect us, they will do all kinds of stuff for us, they will be everywhere and they will be invisible.
That’s the vision of Kotaro Chiba, founder of the newly set-up 1 billion yen (US$16m) DroneFund in Japan. The co-found [...]
At last, I am flavour of the month
I was having lunch with a friend in executive search recently when she told me that I am the new black – meaning someone with my profile is currently in fashion.
Having waited my whole life to hear this, my ears perked up over quinoa salad and chicken breast. This kind of food is also the new b [...]
In Amsterdam, lessons from noodles to mobiles, and Palma to privacy
Three more weeks before I head to Amsterdam to run WIT Europe as part of Phocuswright and I am looking forward to shared experiences and lessons between our two continents.
I’ve always seen Europe as more similar to Asia than any other region – it is multi-lingual, multi-cultural and steeped [...]
On the circle of life, scale and experience chase each other’s tails
In many ways I feel the industry is coming full circle – on one hand, you have the giants of scale talking about local experiences and community and on the other, independents and creatives talking about scale, each knowing you need the other to thrive in a digitally-driven world.
At the recent [...]
Why The Murray, Hong Kong, had me singing like a lark
I must have passed the Hong Kong Government building countless times when I was living in the city. You couldn’t help but do so, located as it is midway between Pacific Place and Central. But the Murray Building was a structure you hardly noticed in a city of super structures – it was nondescrip [...]
Letter from Seoul: South Korea’s travel braces for change as perfect storm approaches
There was a time when I visited Tokyo and I thought I had landed in a science fiction novel. Today I get that same feeling when I visit Seoul.
Its citizens are more attached to their smartphones than anywhere else – by age 12, 72% of South Koreans own a smartphone and they spend 4.5 hours a day [...]
“Data is the new gold” has become “data is the new dirt”
What a week it’s been – first the Facebook data scandal and then the Grab-Uber deal in South-east Asia, and at the heart of it, our identities.
The former led to outrage that we could have been so manipulated by marketers targeting our social profiles (we always have been, it’s just the sca [...]
