Prashant Kirtane out to make Travelstop unstoppable as agent of change in unmanaged corporate travel in Asia
Three years after the sale of Travelmob to HomeAway, co-founder Prashant Kirtane has launched his new startup, Travelstop, to become the “Slack of unmanaged corporate travel” for SMEs in Asia.
The startup, aimed at solving pain points from booking to expense management to providing data insig [...]
Everyone wants to be an Experience Maker – lessons from Coca-Cola and ONE Championship
It seems everyone wants to be in the experience business these days, whether you’re selling bottles of sugared water, body lotion, education or sports. At the Adobe Symposium, held in Singapore this week, they call themselves experience makers.
As I listened to speaker after speaker talk about [...]
Bringing GRRRL Power to Asia – how Olson built a women sportswear brand out of a social movement
In our continuing series of articles around our WIT Singapore Conference theme of “Through The Looking Glass”, where we look outside travel in search of different stories and lessons, we look at how Kortney Olson built a women sportswear brand out of a social movement around giving women self-co [...]
How an island boy and his team grew Klook into a ‘fast fish’ which now wants to swim in world’s ocean
Eric Gnock Fah still remembers the day he presented at the WiT Startup Pitch in Tokyo in June 2015. It was barely a year after he and co-founder Ethan Lin had started Klook, their “discover and book fun-things-to-do at exclusive prices” business, in Hong Kong.
“We were nervous but we though [...]
South Korea’s MyRealTrip joins hands with Naver to launch “Naver Tour”
South Korea’s leading travel platform, MyRealTrip, has launched a new service called “Naver Tour” in partnership with Naver, the country’s largest Internet company.
Naver Tour was co-designed and developed by the two companies, said MyRealTrip’s CEO Donggun Lee. Naver offered the platfo [...]
Armed with $200m more, Klook eyes global domination as it steers course to hit $1b in bookings this year
It seems there is no stopping Klook which will go down in Asia’s travel history as the startup that has raised the most in the shortest time. Today, it announced it has closed $200m in Series D funding, bringing its total financing to date to US$300 million. This latest round makes the in-destinat [...]
Letter from Sydney: Of food made for instagram and the journey towards NDC, diversity and chatbots
At the Two Sis café in Pyrmont where I had lunch my last day in Sydney, the place was packed with youngsters from Asia – there’s a local university nearby and so it’s popular with students. Let’s say my friends and I brought up the average age substantially.
The café, owned by a Cor [...]
Letter from East Coast road trip, Malaysia: Places have not changed, the way we travel has
Driving along the highway that cuts into Kuantan, Pahang, on the Malaysian east coast, my mind casts back to the first ever travel conference I covered as a rookie in the world of travel trade journalism.
The speaker was Mahathir Mohamad, then-Prime Minister who, in this year’s general election [...]
Know your farmer – Sampran Riverside’s Arrut leads organic tourism movement in Thailand
In today’s age, where we have our personal trainers, doctors and lawyers, why shouldn’t we have our personal farmer? That was the food for thought offered by Arrut Navaraj, managing director of Sampran Riverside, at the Travelport Live conference in Bangkok earlier this month when he spoke of ho [...]
After Zanadu, Wu plunges into blockchain and crypto to build Next Gen travel platform. Here’s how he will do it
Having built up Zanadu into China’s premier lifestyle travel platform after a tough but rewarding five years, Zan Wu, together with his co-founder, Dirk Eschenbacher, now wants to create a new startup, Atlas, into “the next generation TripAdvisor and Booking.com combined” using blockchain and [...]
