Social media is where Asia plans, validates and books its trips. So, who do they trust?
85% of APAC travellers still don’t trust AI recommendations at face value.
Here’s a funny paradox. 94% of APAC travellers use AI to plan trips, yet 85% don’t trust what it tells them, according to Klook. So they do what any savvy traveller would do - ask AI for ideas, then check them against [...]
Travel’s new driving lenses for the road ahead
A new beginning was heralded at this year’s WiT Singapore. From three different guests – a hotel tech upstart, a new Middle East airline voice, and an OTA expert in social commerce – we saw a bold splash of what travel’s future road trip will look like.
“Get your motor running: head out [...]
AI wave, local reckoning: Four trends cruise can’t ignore
Confession first: the woman opening a cruise conference is not, by her own admission, a cruiser.
“I am not a big cruiser,” Yeoh Siew Hoon told delegates at Cruise World Asia in Singapore on Wednesday morning, before explaining why she was on stage anyway – WiT, the travel platform she found [...]
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 � [...]
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 [...]
We missed the resident: Rethinking who tourism is for
The closing panel at WiT Indie brought together Raul Guerra, Asia-Pacific Regional Director at the Catalunya Tourism Board, Mich Goh, Director of Public Policy for APAC at Airbnb, and Mildred Ang, Director of Social Commerce at Klook – a destination, a platform under regulatory pressure and an OTA [...]
Winning in attractions: Innovation, personalisation, and the travel experience economy
The global travel landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift, driven by travellers who increasingly prioritise experiences, personalisation, and meaningful connections. For Trip.com Group, this transformation is not merely a response to changing consumer behaviour but an opportunity to define a new [...]
Luxury redefined: From bling to meaning, from sand to soul
If the first age of luxury was about status, and the second about style, the new luxury is about substance.
As moderator Morris Sim (Montara Hospitality) put it, “Luxury is such an overused word. Everyone has their own version of it. But if we start from the customer’s point of view – who [...]
Different origins, same destination: Inside Asia’s three OTA journeys to the future
AirAsia MOVE’s social pivot, Traveloka’s scrappy reinvention, and Rakuten’s ecosystem edge show that the future of travel may be powered by tech, but fuelled by people.
If the past 20 years were about putting travel online, the next 20 will be about keeping it human, while algorithms, agents, [...]
Data, not drama, should shape Airbnb’s short-term rental rules
What does it mean to be a lawyer for a platform operating across various jurisdictions, and doing it in real time? In a conversation with Darrell Chan, Airbnb's APAC General Counsel, the idea of “guerrilla lawyering” is used as a working philosophy. But what does that look like when regulations [...]
