A heady brew of exits, passion and Gen Y desires
I think I traded too much beer last night. So forgive me if this post is a little incoherent, but what the heck, it was the last WITNext in Singapore before we begin the countdown to the WIT Conference in October. It was great for Fritz Demopoulos, former CEO of Qunar, to fly in from Hong Kong for [...]
Letter from Bhutan, Pt 3: Punakha for spirituality and a Karma break
At Dochula Pass, 3,000m above sea level, low clouds partly shroud the 108 stupas that were built to commemorate fallen warriors.This is the midway point between Thimpu and Punakha Valley, where we are headed on Day 3 of our journey through Bhutan, the Land of Thunder Dragon.The drive uphill has been [...]
Letter from Paris: It’s like falling in love again
I am sitting backwards on a TGV from Paris to Pornic via Nantes. It’s not the best direction to be facing but the train is full. It’s August and technically, the whole country is on holiday and so it’s full of Parisians heading to the coast for their annual vacation.At boarding, we meet a youn [...]
WIT Australia: Forget food, sell space, romance and you’ll be right, mate
This time last week, I was stepping off a Virgin Australia flight in Cairns. There was a fresh breeze in the air, the sky was blue and the sea even bluer. Winter’s the best time to be up in tropical north Queensland, I reckon.Cairns today is a very different place to the one I first visited in the [...]
Thank our lucky number WIT Oz escaped the ash?
“We were so lucky,” said my WIT Australia partner, Elizabeth Rich, the day after we had wrapped up our one-day event at the Shangri-La Hotel, Sydney.She was referring to the fact that we had only two speakers and four delegates no-shows despite the ash cloud which returned to wreak havoc in Aust [...]
The what matters more than the how
On Sunday, I spent 15 hours on the road from Penang to Singapore. I had plenty of time to listen to the radio.Most of it was rubbish. I will be glad if I never hear Taylor Swift again. There was one sentence I remembered though, uttered by a deejay whose name I can’t.He said something like, “Do [...]
Watch out, there’s a stray in the neighbourhood: A story of Groupon and hoteliers
I live in what you might call a curated neighbourhood. It’s one of those integrated residential developments and about the only thing we don’t have is a casino although I am told next year we will be able to walk across a bridge and a park to get to the gaming tables. I can’t wait.It’s built [...]
Social web helps Sweetman share Hidden Secrets
In my travels, I am always looking out for entrepreneurs who are trying to do things differently in travel and, in Melbourne, I found such a person.Fiona Sweetman (left) runs Hidden Secrets Tours, a company that takes people on walks through Melbourne’s lanes, arcades and walkways, showing them p [...]
Let The Gamification Begin
If there was one word that stuck in my mind from the three days of discourse, debate and discussion at WIT, it was “gamification”.It was a word that aroused passions too – some people hated it, insisted it didn’t exist as a proper English word while some people loved it, saying language shou [...]
Mobile will change everything, the way Internet did, says Terry Jones
The day I meet Terry Jones, it’s raining in Dubai. It’s quite a rare occasion. Both.I had long wanted to meet the man who founded Travelocity in 1996 – a man who started work life as a travel agent and somehow always found himself to be at the right place at the right time for most of his care [...]
