TravelRave to attract 8,000 delegates over week-long festival
Nino Gruttke, executive director of ITB Asia, has welcomed the idea of being part of TravelRave, the new travel and tourism festival created by the Singapore Tourism Board.The travel and tourism festival, to run from October 18 to 28, will see about 8,000 delegates attend at least six landmark co-lo [...]
Virtually no chance of competing with these babes
I am feeling increasingly redundant these days.First, bloggers took away my livelihood – now, everyone can write. Second, Twitter took away the need for breaking news – now, everyone can report from the trenches. Third, TripAdvisor took away my job of travel writing – now, everyone is a review [...]
Welcome to my ‘hotel family’: A peek into the future
The hotel room is decorated to meet guests’ particular tastes, the bath water is just how they like it, the minibar is stocked with their preferred range of drinks, and their favourite music is playing in the background. This, or something similar, could soon become reality for hotel guests. T [...]
WIT Day One – Airlines: Can they escape the dangerous middle ground?
Nothing like ending the first WIT day with some turbulence from the airline industry. The opening question posed by Timothy O'Neil-Dunne, Managing Partner of T2 Impact was the million dollar question: Is the airline industry in recovery? It's actually hard to know. Indicators say yes, but overal [...]
WIT Day One – And the winner is … Eco Travel
They are young, intelligent, ambitious and brave. They are Singaporeans with bright, big ideas for the online travel space. And they came to pitch to cynical men who named one of them, Eco Tours, a winner.They are the teams who participated in the inaugural WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp and dared [...]
Spring Airlines wants 100% online direct sales
China’s only low cost airline, Spring Airlines, has its eye on one key target – to achieve 100% online direct sales.Lfan Yang, sales and marketing director (left), said that currently it was achieving 75% direct sales.As the only low cost airline in China, Yang said Spring Airlines’ main missi [...]
Tagged and the rest of it is free. Really?
No sooner than we arrived to Le Blanc Resort in Cancun, Mexico, we were given a transparent wristband with an 8-digit number and logo. We had been tagged. We had entered the world of an all-inclusive resort.Have I ever done this before? No.I listened in amazement to the instructions given to us by [...]
The can-do-ness of the last-minute human being
I often wonder if we are doing things more last minute these days because we can.In the old days pre-mobile, if we fixed an appointment to meet someone somewhere sometime, we would just show up.Today, we message while on the way. “See you in 5, sorry late.” And we lie through our teeth as to the [...]
The Friend Effect
It is an irony that it took someone who found it hard to make friends – I love that first scene where he is dumped by his girlfriend – to start a business which allows everyone to make friends.I am talking, of course, about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his story as told by the D [...]
The low-down on social media and hotels
Given the enormous rise in the use of social media across the hotel sector, IDeaS a SAS Company, recently held a conversation with a few industry members on what were some of the best practices being seen in the industry.The panel comprised:• Grahame Tate, Managing Director Asia Pacific, IDeaS a S [...]
