No one has fully conquered Asia yet in tours & activities: BeMyGuest’s Menchaca
Since its inception in 2012, BeMyGuest has grown at a rapid pace to become one of the leading Asian tours & activities platform. Its expansion is the stuff of start-up dreams: in the last three months alone, the company has achieved a record growth of 100 percent and now offers over 10,000 activ [...]
Skyscanner’s Williams: “To win, we have to win in Asia”
Gareth Williams, CEO and co-founder of Skyscanner, on what it will take to win big in Asia, his ambitions for the company he co-founded in 2001 and why he won’t give his AI project a girl name.CEO and one of the three co-founders of Skyscanner, Gareth Williams, is spending more time in Singapore t [...]
Letter from Saigon: Big, young, social and mobile, powered by women
One evening in Saigon, after a lovely dinner at a rooftop garden, we stopped on a sidewalk to have a brief chat about where to go next. Ice cream? Beer? Wine? The choices are endless. Suddenly, a bunch of taxis just stopped by us, the drivers looking at us in anticipation for a ride.Simon Christy, f [...]
Letter from Sydney: Loh Lik Peng on the four-year making of the Old Clare Hotel
Loh Lik Peng's latest project, the Old Clare Hotel Sydney, is due to open end of this month. No one is more relieved than he to see the finish line in sight of this four-year restoration project. The day I was at the construction site of the Old Clare Hotel Sydney, workmen were bringing in, to my [...]
How “tough little” Joyce turned Qantas around; next to hit that sweet spot in loyalty, big data
What I like about Australia is how they call a spade a spade and if they could, they’d abbreviate it (and they probably have) and so when Peter Harbison, executive chairman of CAPA (Centre For Aviation) called Alan Joyce a “tough little bugger” on stage, I wasn’t too surprised.In fact, if I [...]
Mom & pops the real fuel behind the Vietnamese boom
As with most of emerging Asia, the smartphone is transforming Vietnam’s travel market. Digital entrepreneur and marketing specialist Simon Christy, founder and CEO, of VEO Media, started Alehap.vn, a social travel platform, back in 2009 and has since the changes since the beginning. He talks to WI [...]
Letter from Penang: Hack of a thing to do on a Saturday night
It wasn’t what I was expecting to do on a Saturday night in Penang, but I ended up listening to three teams of developers presenting their start-up ideas at a very impromptu hackathon.That I was doing this in a pre-war Chinese shophouse in the heart of the Georgetown World Heritage precinct made i [...]
Game-changer in the making? Ascott teams up with Tujia, CapitaLand gets serious about IT
The private accommodation and real estate market in China and Asia just got a whole lot more interesting with the latest move by Singapore-based CapitaLand to invest in and form a joint venture with Tujia.com, Beijing-based apartment sharing site.CapitaLand is one of Asia’s largest real estate com [...]
The Millennial Traveller: M-commerce on the rise, has mobile made it too easy for our generation?
MasterCard’s latest Mobile Shopping Survey reveals that making purchases via mobile phones is on the rise. More interestingly, however, is how the findings of the study, conducted in October to December of last year in 14 countries including Singapore, Thailand, China, Japan, Australia, Korea, Mal [...]
From model to start-up: How TheLuxeNomad.com beat flash sale fatigue with content
TheLuxeNomad.com founder Stephanie Chai may not always lead a glamorous life – she usually flies budget on short haul trips – but her hotel and villa-booking site certainly conjures up images of the good life. With over 1,000 properties on offer, the site serves up arresting images of high-end h [...]
