Letter from The Cotswolds: Pretty little villages, naked gardens, buried bodies
In Wiltshire, in the Cotswolds Area, there is a tiny, sweet village called Castle Combe. Despite its name, it has no castle, but visiting it, I couldn’t help but think that the villagers living there (last count: 326) wished they had a fortress and moat to keep out the visitors.
It was past six [...]
Unfinished business: Inside the founding of Flagship Group
When I put it to Stephen Oddo that buying back into the tours and activities business he’d built and sold looked a lot like unfinished business, he answered rather reticently. “To a certain degree, for sure,” he said, and then proceeded at some length to explain it off as a “happy coincidenc [...]
Online travel: Today, tomorrow and what’s the day after
As VIDEC wraps its 2026 OTA benchmarking across India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, CEO Virendra Jain sizes up how Trip.com, Expedia, Booking.com, Agoda, Wego, Skyscanner, Airbnb and Google are jockeying for position in travel's most volatile growth markets and what could upend the pecking order next.
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F1 boosts SEA travel. Booking loses Etraveli appeal. Laters.com raises $1.5M. VantisCorp’s TMC platform. More
VantisCorp debuts white-label automation platform for TMCs
VantisCorp launched a white-label corporate travel platform, aimed at Travel Management Companies (TMCs) still relying on spreadsheets, email approvals, and manual invoice reconciliation; it unifies hotel and flight booking (with TMC-specif [...]
We’re carrying next-generation intelligence inside a last-generation interaction paradigm
Forty-six teams. Three-minute demos. One Agentic AI Hackathon.
When the judges sat back on the first judging round of the Alibaba Cloud x Atlas Agentic AI Hackathon Singapore 2026 to get to the shortlist of 10 submissions, the first thing they agreed on wasn’t “how strong the tech was this year [...]
Online Travel in Asia: The Unwritten Story (Documentary premiere)
WiT's follow-up documentary sits down with travel tech founders, leaders and rising innovators to ask what's about to change, what never will, and what they'd tell their younger selves.
Every industry has a moment it can't quite explain until it's living through one. For online travel in Asia, that [...]
Local grit, global impact: four Kiwi founders on building tech from the world’s edge
Some people eat to live. Some people live to eat. All startups though live and die by solving the pain points they’ve chosen to tackle.
Which was how I kicked off the panel, “Local Grit, Global Impact: Kiwi Innovation in Travel & Hospitality Tech” at WiT Queenstown. I asked the question � [...]
Resilient travel demand for GCC destinations signals recovery potential through the end of 2026
Travel intelligence analysis by The Data Appeal Company finds that, while the February escalation triggered an immediate shock to travel sentiment and hotel demand across the GCC, travellers have progressively become less reactive to renewed tensions—pointing to strong recovery potential if disrup [...]
The red ocean of content: Who still makes travellers move?
“3 years ago, when we launched Kreatorverse, it was an experiment. Last year, it was starting to form a structure. This year, we see scale,” said Wilfred Fan, Chief Commercial Officer of Klook.
Then came the warning.
“When things start to scale, it becomes a red ocean. There are too many [...]
As AI changes how we book travel, iWander bets on how we actually explore
iWander co-founder and CEO Marius Nigond on building AI-guided walking tours for a generation of travelers who want spontaneity, not a fixed itinerary
Travel planning is being influenced by AI faster than almost any other part of the industry. Google just moved agentic hotel booking out of pilot mo [...]
