South Korea’s MyRealTrip gets US$6mil investment to step up expansion
MyRealTrip, South Korea’s leading tour and activity platform, has received ₩7 billion (US$6.2 million) investment from five VCs, bringing its total funding to ₩12.3 billion (US$10.9 million).
The new investors are SmileGate Investment, Altos Ventures, Imm Investment, Mirae Asset-Naver Fund [...]
Tech should make Better Travel for everyone, with disabilities you can or cannot see
What’s your disability? Because as far as clinical psychologist Nicky Abdinor, born without arms and shortened legs, is concerned, “everyone has a disability, it’s just that you can see mine”.
And perhaps disabilities you can see versus those that aren’t visible may be easier to deal wi [...]
AccorHotels expands footprint in Australia, acquires Mantra Group for A$1.3bil
AccorHotels is on the acquisition trail again, this time buying Mantra Group, one of Australia’s largest hotel and resort marketers and operators with 127 properties and over 20,000 rooms.
The French hotel group has just inked the agreement to buy the group and to acquire all of the issued ca [...]
Letter from Muscat: And so we enter the golden age of digital travel in Middle East
For some reason, Muscat seems closer in my mind than it really is. To get here, I had to connect via Dubai and with a four-hour layover, it’s almost a 12-hour journey and I thought I could have flown to London in that time.
But returning to Oman eight years later was what I wanted to do. After [...]
Thought leaders, disruptors to gather in Singapore for travel forum sharing ideas on Better Travel
In less than two weeks, the bigwigs of the travel industry and up-and-coming disruptors will gather in Singapore for a three-day conference to cultivate ideas and ponder new ways to improve the travel experience.
Some 500 delegates are expected to attend the conference that will run from [...]
Wego’s Ross Veitch on getting the timing right for Middle East and marketplace ambitions
He may have been too early for Singapore as well as Indonesia – indeed South-east Asia in general – but Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego, believes he’s finally hit the right timing in the Middle East.
“We probably went into emerging markets too early,” he said. “We thought they [...]
Union pushback: Tough lessons learnt on MyCape’s startup journey
Coalescing his early experiences flying on standby as a child of airline executives with his understanding of challenges facing airlines managing perishable products, and then his engineering and enterprise technology knowledge, Lyle Jover set himself on a mission – to help full-service carriers c [...]
WIT Art For Good fights hunger and poverty in the Philippines
The fight against hunger and poverty in the Philippines will be helped along by this year’s edition of WIT’s Art For Good programme, to be held in conjunction with the WIT conference in Singapore.
WIT’s Art For Good programme is an annual fund raiser that has contributed approximately US$50 [...]
From idea to enterprise product, from WIT to New York
When Lyle Jover, co-founder and CEO of MyCape submitted his entry for a shot at the grand prize offered by WIT Startup Pitch last year, MyCape was “barely an idea”. A year later, it is now a “full-blown product, enterprise grade and has a great product fit with airline”.
MyCape is a socia [...]
Huge incumbents in travel are hard to dislodge but Bao Bean sees opportunities around solving specific problems
William Bao Bean, general partner at SOSV, named the world’s most active seed investor by TechCrunch Crunchbase, has his eye on travel but is aware that the potential for new technology to really disrupt the industry is hard.
“Travel is a closed insular industry, there’s a lot of histor [...]
