Low-cost, high stakes: How Air India Express and Transavia are navigating change
Air India Express and Transavia offer contrasting but complementary lessons on growth, digital transformation and the enduring power of brand in a price-driven world.
What does a budget airline in the Netherlands have in common with a low-cost carrier reshaping mobility across India? More than you [...]
AI + Omotenashi: Hail, a new partnership in travel
JTB’s Eijiro Yamakita on reading the room, sensing the world, and why the renaissance of travel is already here.
There is a word that does not translate easily. Omotenashi, often rendered as “Japanese hospitality”, is, as Eijiro Yamakita gently reminded the audience at WiT Japan, neither a me [...]
Agoda’s Morgenshtern on leaps of faith, B2B bets, and why optimisers must become leapers
Agoda’s CEO marks 12 years at the helm with a candid reckoning: what got you here won’t get you there and the age of AI demands something harder than data.
Omri Morgenshtern, CEO of Agoda, arrived at his first WiT Japan at what he cheerfully acknowledged was a full cycle – 12 years at Agoda, [...]
A global OTA view on the next frontier: AI, India and the battle for independent hotels
Booking.com’s Nuno Guerreiro on closing the trust gap, the India boom and how alternative accommodation is now mainstream
The conversation with Nuno Guerreiro, regional director for North and South Asia Pacific at Booking.com, covered three key questions – whether AI will actually change how pe [...]
Bridging two worlds: Mayumi Nakamura Birt on reinvention, resilience and the art of the imperfect
Veltra’s chief transformation officer returned to Japan six months ago. What she found was a country on the edge of something, if it can tolerate the mess of getting there
Mayumi Nakamura Birt spent more than two decades running a SaaS company in the US. She learned to fail fast, move on, and t [...]
Letter from Tokyo: Samurai power, love robots, AI storm in a teacup
Key takeaways from WiT Japan 2026
A Samurai performance at the start, love robots at the end and in between one-and-half-day of conversations about “The Next 20: Precision, Reinvention and Quiet Power”.
Only in Japan could the precise sit comfortably with poetry, the quiet power of a centuri [...]
Trust, data and the sovereign traveller: Lufthansa and Trip.com on co-creating value
If there was one message that came through at the Trip.com Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam, it was that the willingness is there to “co-create value with intelligence, trust and partnership” but numerous obstacles stand in the way.
The closing panel featuring CT Ooi, CEO of Flights, Tr [...]
Don’t play defence: The lesson two Expedia CEOs agree on
Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi returns to the Explore stage to exchange lessons with Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin
It felt like it was almost always meant to be. Former CEO and now Uber chief, Dara Khosrowshahi back on stage at Explore with current CEO Ariane Gorin – the two having just signed a la [...]
Greg Schulze: 21 years of Expedia, and a New Beginning
I first met Greg Schulze, the outgoing chief commercial officer of Expedia Group, over kaya toast in Singapore.
That detail matters, not because of the toast, though it is, objectively, one of the great breakfast foods of the world, but because it was the beginning of what would become one of m [...]
Letter from Las Vegas: The Techies built it, now the Fuzzies want it back.
The slot machines get you first. That relentless ding, ding, ding as you walk into the ARIA lobby, the raucous laughter from the bars, the crowds hunched over gaming tables – I can’t be anywhere else but Las Vegas.
I’d come off two full flights from Singapore via San Francisco, and the Stri [...]
