Intrepid’s James Thornton: “If everyone goes right, we’ll often be going left”
WiT Queenstown was James Thornton’s first day back at work, fresh off three weeks in Greece, where, he stressed to the audience, he was fully, deliberately offline.
“I think some CEOs find it really bizarre that I wouldn’t do emails and calls on holiday,” he said. “But great companies h [...]
Travel Happiness Index: It’s not the dessert, it’s the vitamins
Amid all the gloom and doom around us, it’s good to get a little happy news now and then, and yesterday Booking.com launched its Travel Happiness Index, which shows that 98% of APAC travellers associate travel with positive emotion, 84% say it helps them reset mentally, and, most tellingly, nine i [...]
The different faces of indie hospitality: Hopeless romantics who can read P&Ls to entrepreneurial general managers
At WiT Indie, three very different hospitality models – a UNESCO heritage boutique, a globally scaled brand with its roots in serviced residence, and a 140-year-old colonial grand dame – sat on the same panel to address a key question – what does it mean to serve the independent traveller in s [...]
Letter from Queenstown: Of resilience, soil and microbes
Amanda Currie breeds microbes for a living now. She’s gone from reading spreadsheets in financial regulation to studying soil on a farm.
“I found myself looking at soil under a microscope,” she told a WiT Queenstown panel on “Food, Identity & Tourism”. “And when I did that, I realis [...]
We missed the resident: Rethinking who tourism is for
The closing panel at WiT Indie brought together Raul Guerra, Asia-Pacific Regional Director at the Catalunya Tourism Board, Mich Goh, Director of Public Policy for APAC at Airbnb, and Mildred Ang, Director of Social Commerce at Klook – a destination, a platform under regulatory pressure and an OTA [...]
Two deals, one vision: Omio’s CFO on building the world’s ground distribution backbone
In an exclusive interview with WiT – his first since the announcements – Omio Group CFO Jean-Bernard Moens explains why a $10 million Asia-Pacific investment and the proposed acquisition of Rail Europe landed in the same week, and how they both lead to the same destination.
Two announcement [...]
From bin centre to boardroom: Rayner Loi’s ten-year war on food waste
Lumitics acquired by Winnow to strengthen APAC’s foothold
Ten years ago, Rayner Loi stood in a hotel bin centre in Singapore, staring at 20 to 30 green 120-litre bins waiting for the waste collector. It was his first time in a hotel’s back-of-house. He had no hospitality, no culinary experience [...]
Indie travel, rewritten: Four shifts reshaping Asia’s independent traveller
At WiT Indie, Klook, AirAsia MOVE and Booking.com unpack the generational, AI, supply and community forces changing how APAC travellers explore on their own terms
Hot on the heels of WiT’s newly released “The Indie Stack”, which dove into the fast-growing and equally-fast-changing independent [...]
The Icelandic startup connecting the dots for air travellers, Asia next on radar
David Gunnarsson does not waste words. The CEO of Dohop, the Icelandic travel technology company that has spent two decades solving one of aviation’s most stubborn problems – how to connect passengers across airlines that do not talk to each other – speaks the way he thinks: directly, precisel [...]
The next generation of hospitality: When the room is no longer the point
A ryokan owner, a global brand VP, a lifestyle acquirer and a boutique operator debate what will actually make a guest choose you in the next 20 years.
A panel at WiT Japan on “The Next Generation of Hospitality” brought together four voices with sharply different stakes in the answer.
Kyohe [...]
