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 [...]
BeMyGuest’s Hit List 2: Things You Ought To Know About Bali’s Tours & Activities
Tours & activities is an interesting space. Other than attracting a lot of attention from investors, it also provides insights into the destinations favoured by travellers, what they like to do while in a destination and how they book these activities and experiences. In this second column, Grah [...]
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 [...]
Next-gen disruption in aviation will be constructive, blend of legacy and innovation
Growing up, there was a certain glamour to air travel. It didn’t quite match the glamour of the 1960s and 70s, but I can distinctly remember being too excited to sleep as a child, the day before any long-haul flight.
Fast forward to now, the idea of spending 13 straight hours in a hard-backed c [...]
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 [...]
Through The Looking Glass: What drives Industry 4.0 companies and how you can be Business 4.0
If you are a Business 3.0 company, it’s time to take it up a notch because Industry 4.0 is here where tech adoption is happening at an accelerated scale, challenging traditional business models and giving rise to new ones. And if you look “Through The Looking Glass”, you can take lessons fro [...]
Meta & Messaging: A Marriage Made In Heaven? LINE invests in Venture Republic to ease entry into travel
In yet another sign of the consolidation and disruption taking place in the digital travel space, LINE Corporation, which runs Japan’s dominant messaging app, has taken a 34% equity in Venture Republic (VR), which operates “Travel.jp” Japan’s leading travel metasearch.
The dollar value of [...]
Through the Looking Glass: Dig deeper into your customer base before hunting in new pools
In this second of the series of articles around our WIT Singapore 2018 Conference theme of “Through The Looking Glass”, where we look outside travel in search of different stories and lessons, we turn to Japan’s third largest convenience store chain, Lawson, on how it is evolving its tradition [...]
